Monster Mine (22 page)

“
Ollie?” I shouted down
the hall.

“
Help! Help
me!”

My blood fizzed in my
veins.

“
It’s Ollie,” I shouted
back at Hatter, who was still sitting on the edge of my bed,
looking vaguely stunned. “Shit,” I hissed to myself. I stuffed my
feet into my boots. “Shit. Shit.
Shit
.”

Wearing duck pajamas and snow boots, I
tore downstairs, shaking the metal stairs so hard I thought they
might disconnect from the second floor. “Ollie?” I shouted into the
darkness of downstairs. It was still the middle of the night, and I
had yet to figure out where the main light switches were for the
overhead lights. A bay door was open, and I shivered against the
chilly winter air. “Ollie?”

“
Over here!”

I spun toward the sound of her voice.
She hadn’t even made it halfway across the space before collapsing
and curling over herself. She looked up at me, and I caught the
wild, frantic gleam in her eyes. Something dark and wet was smeared
across her chest.

“
Oh my gosh.” I ran to
her, falling to my knees and sliding the final few feet, nearly
colliding with her. “Are you bleeding? Are you hurt? What
happened—”

Then I saw him: Ghost. Ollie had him
cradled in her lap, his face chalk white and his body far too
still.

“
She tore him open. You
have to help him.”

Her teeth chattered, clacking like
this old set of wind-up plastic teeth my brothers had given me as a
gag gift on my birthday.

“
Here. Here.” I was
talking, not knowing what I was saying.

I laid Ghost out between us. Ollie
could barely let him go. He seemed to peel away from her, and when
he did, a lot of him was missing.

“
Oh, shit,” I said,
staring down at his torn-up belly. I saw guts and bones. I would
need some light.

“
Sunny?” Hatter clanged
down the stairs. “What’s going on?”

“
Lights!” I yelled, voice
cracking. “Get the lights!”

Ollie scrambled away, and as she went,
I saw her limp and cataloged it in the back of my mind. She was
hurt too. Something bad had happened. Something awful.

The lights flared on above me, too
sharp and too bright, and everything around me was red, red, red.
Blood coated Ghost in half-dried roping layers. His skin was
cold.

I checked for a pulse, having to move
my fingers around his neck because it was so ragged and ripped up.
I found a subtle thrum right as Hatter knelt next to me.

“
What do you need?” he
asked.

“
Everything.” I pushed
what was left of Ghost’s shirt and jacket back, my hands hovering
over his wounds as I tried to figure out where to start. Ollie had
stuffed her jacket deep into his wounds, and it was the only thing
keeping him alive.

“
More specific,
Sunshine.”

“
Th-the med kits,” I
managed. My hands were shaking. A voice in the back of my mind
whispered that Ghost was going to die because of me, because I
wasn’t good enough. “In the cabinets. Get all of them.”

He was already gone by the time Ollie
returned. “Will he be okay?”

“
What happened?” I asked.
In the light, I saw the extent of her injures. Blood seeped from
her shirt, her neck and right shoulder scraped and
bitten.

“
The Manananggal got
him.”

“
I have to stop this
bleeding.”

There was too much blood to locate the
source, though I suspected it was coming from everywhere. He needed
more help than I could provide and more tools than I had on hand.
He needed a hospital and a team of doctors. If I could get him
stable enough to travel . . .

“
Here.” Hatter dumped an
armload of medical kits next to me and started opening them, but
they were just the basics. Nothing was advanced enough to help
Ghost.

I looked up at Ollie. “We have to get
him to a hospital. I can’t do anything with just a few basic suture
kits. It’s not enough.”

Ollie didn’t hesitate. “I’ll get the
Jeep.”

Behind us, the stairs clanged with
footsteps. I didn’t glance back, but I caught the shift in Ollie—a
repositioning of her body toward the person, which I doubted she’d
even noticed—and knew it was Luke.

“
Ollie!” Luke shouted,
running up to us.

I glanced back and saw him taking in
the bloody scene. He was enough of a hunter to know what had
happened and how quickly we had to move.

“
Here’re the keys,” he
said to Ollie. “Hatter, help me lift him.”

I maneuvered with the guys to stay in
place next to Ghost. I kept my hands pressed against the jacket in
his torn stomach, but I sensed a growing stillness inside him. His
eyelids didn’t flutter as we passed under the door’s shadow and his
breath didn’t condense in front of his mouth from the cold air
outside.

Ollie started the car and revved the
engine, blowing smoke out of the muffler. It skidded over the
packed snow toward us. In a spray of snow, she hit the brakes right
next to us. I yanked the back door open and moved out of the way.
Luke, at Ghost’s head, angled into the car’s backseat and, with
Hatter’s help, started sliding Ghost inside.

“
Hey!”

I jumped, my eyes flashing to Ghost,
but it wasn’t him who’d spoken. The voice had come from behind
me.

Ollie stuck her head out of the
driver’s window and shouted, “It’s Ghost! He’s hurt really
bad!”

I spun around. Thad, Lauren, and their
entire tracking team were running in from the western warehouses.
Lauren motioned to the team and they circled around the car.
Without a word, Thad watched as Luke and Hatter finished getting
Ghost’s limp form into the car.

“
The Manananggal?” Thad
asked, eyes sweeping over Ghost’s injuries.

“
She had him in the
. . .”

Ignoring Ollie’s explanation, I moved
to the door to join Luke in the back with Ghost. Hatter started
toward the passenger front seat. As I went to close the door, Thad
caught it in his grip.

“
You can’t go,” he
said.

“
What do you mean? We have
to. You don’t have enough equipment,” I said.

He shook his head. “He’s not going to
the hospital.”

“
What the fuck, Thad? He’s
dying!” Ollie shouted from the front.

“
Get in, Sunny,” Luke said
without looking up from his task of applying pressure to Ghost’s
wounds. I heard the strain in his voice and knew we had to
go.

I started in again, but Thad grabbed
my arm and pulled me back. I stumbled.

“
Don’t fucking touch her!”
Hatter yelled.

Ollie’s door sprang open, knocking
into Thad. Around us, his team drew their guns, with too many
safeties flipping off to make sense of. They were all pointing at
us. Hatter was around the car in a flash, a fierce growl ripping
from his throat, but a few of the bigger guys rushed forward and
cut him off, throwing him against the car.

“
Stop!” I screamed, still
in Thad’s crushing grip, and watched in horror as his team shoved
Hatter’s face against the icy window of the car.

“
What the hell are you
doing?” Ollie pounded her fist into Thad’s side. He grunted from
the blow but didn’t release me.

“
You can’t take him to the
hospital, Ollie,” Thad said through his teeth.

“
They’ll see what he is,”
Lauren added, her gun pointed dead center at Ollie’s
back.

“
So?” she shouted, not
bothering to address Lauren, though I kept my eyes on her. “He’s
going to die!”

“
We’ll do what we can to
help him here, but he’s not going anywhere.” With a nod from Thad,
the rest of his team moved to the backseat of the car and started
pulling Ghost out. From inside, Luke swore and threatened them, but
he could do nothing against the four guys tugging Ghost out by his
feet.

I swayed, dizzy, when one guy—Reece,
if I remembered correctly—tossed Ghost over his
shoulder.

“
You’re going to kill
him,” I said, numbly watching as they took him back
inside.

Thad released my arm, and the guys
holding Hatter eased off. Luke clambered out of the car, through
the blood Ghost had left behind, and emerged into the cold with a
snarl. Ollie shoved Thad.

“
What the hell?” she
shouted, her voice echoing off the buildings around us.

“
You know this, Ollie,”
Thad said.

I didn’t care about the pain in his
voice or the strain in his eyes. He was a monster. A killer. Ghost
was just a boy.

“
No, I don’t! What the
fuck is wrong with you?”

“
Those are the rules. None
of us go to the hospital. No one can know what we are or where we
are.” Thad talked as if he were explaining the basic ways of the
world to a child.

“
Whose rules?”

Thad cringed. “Hex’s.”

I’d stepped back far enough to see
everyone all at once and how they were reacting. Hatter strained
against the guys holding him, his frantic eyes locked on me. Luke
was moving toward Ollie, who fractured when she realized her father
had set the rules that would kill a boy tonight. Those words
changed her—again. The rage boiled up, and she surged
forward.

Lauren’s finger went to the trigger,
her aim still on Ollie’s back. Her face lowered and her eyes
narrowed.

I moved faster than anyone and
launched myself at Lauren with a shrill sound coming from my
throat. With a metal crunch, I hit her square in the side, sending
her aim wide. The bullet cracked through the air, hitting the
ground a few feet to Ollie’s right. Together, Lauren and I hit the
side of the Jeep. Her grip went slack on the gun, and I jerked it
loose. My hands were moving of their own accord, spinning the gun’s
barrel around, and my finger slid along the trigger guard. I aimed
the muzzle at her face.

Ollie pivoted around. Everyone went
still when they realized what had happened, except for Lauren, who
shoved off the car and spat, “I’ll kill you, you bitch.”

“
You were going to shoot
me?” Ollie asked, but it wasn’t a question.

The killing sound was in her voice.
Quiet. Calm. Like when we’d fought the aswang together during
Fields. Her red murder haze, she’d called it.

“
You were going to shoot
me in the back.” She turned to Thad. “Like a little fucking coward.
You’re all cowards.”

He raised his hands, hearing the tone
in her voice too. Luke stepped forward, his eyes sweeping between
Thad and Lauren and the team coming back from putting Ghost in the
warehouse with their guns ready.

“
We have to have rules,”
Thad said to her. “Just like the university has rules.”

“
No,” Ollie growled. “The
university has a fully stocked hospital with doctors and trained
nurses. They can save people. You have a little piece of shit,” she
said, flicking her chin toward Lauren, “and a few fucking
Band-Aids.”

There was going to be a fight. Tension
crackled in the air like heat lightning on a summer evening. But
Ghost was inside, still bleeding out. I hit the safety on the gun
and tossed it into the shadows before turning back to the
warehouse.

“
Where do you think you’re
going?” Lauren snapped at me.

I ignored her. The others followed me
into the warehouse, matching my hurried steps. Inside, Ghost was
lying on a piece of plastic, his clothes ripped open, with one guy
applying pressure to his abdomen. I didn’t see his chest rising
with air.

“
Stay back,” Lauren hissed
as she shoved by us. She started calling out directions at the
others as she tore off her jacket and knelt next to Ghost. I stayed
back, knowing by the strange stillness within him that he wasn’t
there anymore.

I felt Ollie, Luke, and Hatter around
me. Ollie was trembling, and Luke was holding her back, his grip on
her shirt to keep from touching her and setting her off.

Thad went to the medical cabinets that
were always locked. He produced a key and opened a shelf. There, on
the narrow shelves, were the unmarked, white pill bottles. He
brought a bottle and some syringes over to Lauren, who was still
searching for a pulse.

“
Get them upstairs,” he
said, uncapping the bottle as he crouched next to Lauren.
“Now.”

His team converged around us. They
pulled us toward the stairs. Ollie fought halfheartedly, her eyes
locked on Ghost’s body. Coldness iced over her blue eyes, reminding
me of the large lagoons up in Barrow, iced and packed over with
crystal-like snow, but mostly, she looked furious.

But I searched her eyes for something
more. For a reaction from the Manananggal’s bite. It was almost
impossible to work out if she was in pain, but her eyes were
red-rimmed, her face pale. She looked shaky and ready to throw up.
I raked my eyes back to Thad. The Manananggal was a type of aswang;
it made sense that they would try to treat Ghost’s reaction to her
saliva, especially if there was something in the solution that
could help a halfling recover faster.