Monster Mine (33 page)

* * *

Sunny

I carried all the bane I could in one
arm. The glass vials rattled in their little carriers. The delicate
clinking sound, like a wind chime, followed me as I made my way up
the stairs and into the main hallway. It was slow going. My legs
felt too cold to move sometimes. Everything was so cold I thought I
might see my breath in front of my face.

At least the chilly air helped slow my
bleeding down even more, which was good, considering I couldn’t die
just yet.

There were bodies in the hall leading
to the entry. One of them was Lauren, but I didn’t look down. I
couldn’t see their faces. One of them might be someone I knew.
Someone who had sat beside me in a class. Or worse, Luke, Ollie, or
Hatter.

Focus on the bane, Sunny.
Get it outside.

The thought refocused me, and I
snapped to attention. I had a job to do, and I would do it, no
matter what.

The school’s walls shook from the
explosions. Dust rained down from the ceiling. Gunshots went off
outside so often they sounded continuous. I never
flinched.

I knew people were dying. I knew
aswangs were attacking. I knew I was dying.

But I felt oddly . . . fine
with it. I could do my part. That was all.

The front door was torn from the wall,
and I walked through the hole.

Outside was worse than I’d
expected.

The front gate beyond the courtyard
had been reduced to rubble. Areas of the fence had been blasted
apart. Guards tried to hold the line, but I saw almost as many
’swangs as I did hunters. One ran by me, its ears swiveling toward
me and a snarl on its mouth, while I just watched. It skidded to a
stop and turned back.

I pulled out a glass vial of bane. It
was probably enough to kill thirty ’swangs, but I didn’t take the
time to doll out a pinch.

It leaped toward me, mouth
open.

I tossed the vial into its mouth. It
hit the back of its throat, and the ’swang choked, biting down on
reflex. I stepped aside as it slammed into the school’s entry wall
behind me. I heard the glass break in its mouth and imagined the
bane sliding down its throat. I shrugged and walked
forward.

A hunter rushing across the courtyard
saw me. His eyes flashed to the ’swang behind me. “Go to the
dorms,” he shouted, running up to me and waving me back. “Everyone
is on lockdown there!”

“
Take some wolf’s bane,” I
said, offering him a tray of vials.

He blinked at me, his legs fumbling to
a stop. “What?”

“
I have bane. You can have
some if you want.”

He took the tray. “Are you
okay?”

“
Peachy!”

Across the courtyard, a commotion
caught my attention. A group of ’swangs had a person on the ground
between them. They dove in like vultures swooping in from the sky
and tore at him. He screamed.

I recognized his voice.

Killian.

I moved forward without thinking, my
eyes locked on the heap of flesh and teeth. I wondered who had
broken him out of his cell and if another halfling had snuck in to
do the job. I thought I should maybe call for help or get that
hunter to help me.

I was close enough to see that an
aswang had Killian’s hand in its mouth. It shook its head like a
dog with a bone and tore his hand from his arm. There was a lot of
blood, almost as much as I’d lost, which reminded me: I needed to
move.

I turned away from Killian, owing him
nothing and unafraid to leave him for dead. My eyes fell on the
rook’s nest overlooking Tick Tock Bay, the one I’d found Ollie in
on the second morning I knew her. I spotted Luke, the countless
spotlights along the top of the walls lighting up his form. He was
easy enough to find because he was the only other person standing
as still as I was. I glanced up right as he saw his
father.

We both watched the ’swangs tear into
Killian’s belly and pull out his guts. Killian’s screams were
choked and tortured, awful and wretched.

Back in the nest, Luke raised his
crossbow and stared down the sights. He paused, only slightly, and
then fired.

The arrow knocked his father’s head
back against the courtyard’s tiled bricks. It had gone straight
through his eye. The ’swangs, knowing the game was over, dispersed
to find fresher prey.

I looked up in time to see Luke
staring at his father with an odd look on his face.

Something like remorse. Something like
relief.

I had to keep going, my brain told me.
When I walked off, I thought I might be floating. I felt so light
and cool on the inside. Maybe I was already dead. Maybe I was just
a ghost.

The thought didn’t bother me as much
as it should have.

“
Hatter?” I
called.

Another hunter ran by.

“
Hey!” I shouted at him.
“Do you want some bane?”

He stumbled to a stop, looked at me,
looked at the bane tray I was offering, and took off running
again.

“
Well, okay. It would
help, you know.”

“
Sunny?”

I turned toward the voice.

Hatter stood a few feet away with
Ollie’s arm slung over his shoulder. She was slumped forward, her
eyes closed. A trickle of blood poured down from her temple.
Hatter’s eyes went from my arm, to the vials, to my
face.

My face. I felt the difference
too.

Something was wrong with
me.

I smiled at him. “I brought bane!
Don’t use it all at once.”

He took the trays when I offered them
to him. Something was wrong with him too, because when he looked at
the blood coming down my arm and pooling at my feet, he didn’t
move. Normally, he would’ve moved. At least I thought so. Maybe my
face really did look bad. Maybe I really was a ghost.

Ollie groaned as he shifted her
around. Her eyelids fluttered. She muttered something that sounded
like my name.

My attention shifted to Hatter. “Tell
her I love her.”

He still hadn’t recovered from seeing
me.

I fell to my knees.

I think what happened next was me
dying, but it felt pretty good.

Like a nap on a rainy day.

Like my Gran brushing my hair with her
fingers.

Like . . . the
end.

T W E N T Y - T H R E
E

Sunny

Five Days Later

F
ear University had managed to beat the aswangs back on the
night of the fight. The bane had helped. I guess, in that way, I’d
helped too.

But more importantly, the university
did indeed change in the days after the battle broke out, just like
Ollie promised it would.

She always kept her promises. It was
the scariest thing about her.

The changes were small, of course. The
bigger ones would happen in the years to come. Ollie sent for the
halflings at her mother’s warehouse in Anchorage. Any who wanted a
safe place were welcome at Fear University. Not all of them came,
only some, including Thad, but some was a good enough
start.

Tully’s funeral was held the day after
the fight. They burned his body separately from the others, on a
small pyre along the rocky beach of Tick Tock Bay during sunset. As
his ashes danced into the sky, those watching imagined him joining
his family. Luke had never told anyone he didn’t believe in an
afterlife, but as he watched Tully’s body burn, he prayed. He
prayed that Tully found peace. Found his wife and little ones. Luke
prayed for a peaceful place in death. He hoped someone would pray
for the same thing for him at his funeral one day.

Ollie stayed on the beach a long time
after the pyre was just a smoking heap of char. The waves rolled in
softly, breaking against the rocks and slipping up to her toes
before trickling back again. She watched the waves come and go, the
moonlight inching across the bay and the cliffs wrapping around her
like a hug.

After a long while, she stood, her
father’s silver and diamond knuckles in the palm of her hand. His
body hadn’t been amongst the aswang dead the next morning, and none
of the hunters who could recount the events had spotted him. Ollie
thought he might have left after killing Tully, but she couldn’t be
sure. The only thing she knew for certain was that he was still out
there, alive. She pulled her arm back, ready to send the piece of
her father into the ocean.

But right as she was about to throw
it, she paused, the diamonds pressing against her fingers. She
lowered her arm and stared at the weapon. She couldn’t do it. Part
of her wanted to, wanted nothing more to do with her father, but to
a bigger part of herself, drowning a piece of her father felt like
running away, and Ollie wasn’t running ever again.

The day would come when she would have
to hunt him down. That day might come sooner than she wanted to
think about, but when it did, she would be ready. Just like she
would be ready when Dean betrayed her. The day would come when she
couldn’t further his search for the fear switch, and he would come
after her. She had more battles in her future, but they didn’t feel
so pressing today.

She stood on the beach and made peace
with the fact that she was a monster’s daughter, her father’s
child. It was easier than she thought, because beneath the moon of
Tick Tock Bay with Fear University at her back, she was also her
mother’s daughter. She’d discovered how to believe in something
bigger than herself. She believed in the good of the whole rather
than the sins of the individual.

The best lesson a mother could teach
her daughter during war.

For a moment, Ollie found all her bent
angles and all her sins a little less worthy of fear.

She was done being afraid of
herself.

Killian’s body was burned the day
after Tully’s. He didn’t get a pyre, but Luke dug a hole in the
ground the size of his body, and as his father smoldered, he stood
beside Ollie, his mother, and Hatter. When it was all over, he took
some of his father’s ashes for reasons he wasn’t quite able to
express. Later, he would put them in a thin leather pouch and hang
it around his neck. He’d never take it off, and it would always
remind him that he could be more.

After they’d filled in the hole,
leaving most of his father behind in an unmarked place beneath the
cottonwoods, he walked his mother to the airfield and said goodbye.
She’d return to Barrow, to her home, along with the other Barrow
hunters. Eve promised to look after her, and Luke vowed to visit
more.

His mother paused on her way to the
plane and looked back. She said to tell Irena Volkova she said
goodbye.

Luke almost corrected her, but he
decided not to. He said he would and waved as he watched the plane
take off.

He thought Ollie might enjoy being
confused with her mother on occasion. When he told her later that
night, outside my room in the ward, she smiled and kissed him
without hesitation. They stood there for a few minutes, him bowed
over her, arms wrapped around her waist, his forehead resting
against hers, and her on her tiptoes, her arms locked around his
neck, and her body pressed into him.

His words washed over her face as he
said, “She’ll be okay.”

Ollie knew who he meant.

Me.

Ollie pressed a final kiss against his
mouth, quick and familiar, like there would be many more to follow
in the years to come. Years of holding him. Kissing him. Finding
his caramel candy wrappers under the bed. She took his hand and
walked into my room.

Hatter sat next to me, as he had been
almost every moment since I’d found him on the
battlefield.

Nyny busied herself by taking my
vitals and checking the bandages on my arm, which the university’s
doctors had been able to save, though I would have massive black
scarring. She pulled back my eyelids and shone a light into my
pupils. Nothing, same as it had been since I’d injected myself. A
coma like this, she knew, was bad. The fool, she thought, but she
smiled faintly down at me and pushed back a piece of my hair. The
crazy fool. She’d done my blood work, proving we’d been close to
finding an antidote.

Nyny and Ollie speculated that I
hadn’t just been delusional from the blood loss when I took the
antidote. They had a theory about my reaction to ’swang saliva.
They thought it had made me fearless. I thought that was
funny.

I was the Cowardly Lyon. I always
would be.

I’d hoped to avoid all this fuss, if I
were honest. I didn’t like it. It bothered me to worry them so
much.

Hatter’s guilt was the worst of it. I
hated it. The first night in the ward, when I didn’t wake up and
everyone was still bleeding and shaken from the fight, Nyny told
them what we’d been doing in the lab, what I’d taken, and the “why”
of it all. Ollie had cried and Luke had held her. But Hatter had
crumpled. He’d fallen to his knees with my hand gripped in both of
his, and he’d lost it. And Luke had knelt next to him and held him
against his chest. And Ollie had taken a spot on the floor on his
other side, her arms going around his middle. And they’d sat like
that for hours, holding each other, not saying a word.