Monster Mine (9 page)

“
The fastest way to turn
into a ’swang appetizer too.”

“
Not helping, Hatter.”
Sunny leveled him with a no-nonsense stare, like a librarian’s, if
only she had those prim little glasses attached to a delicate gold
chain around her neck. “What if we go out too? Just in
case?”

“
If they let us out of
here,” Luke said. “They might think we’ll run straight to a phone
and call up the university.” The way he said it, I knew he thought
that was actually a good plan.

“
And they took our
weapons. We have nothing to fight with.” Hatter’s worry over the
lack of weapons clearly had nothing to do with him and Luke and
everything to do with Sunny.

“
Don’t forget there’s a
rogue aswang out there roaming about. He killed three others and
ate their guts out.” Sunny blanched at little as she spoke the last
few words.

“
I’m not asking you to go
out,” I said. “When I get—”

“
If you’re going, we’re
going. That’s settled.” Luke picked up his jacket from the top of
the dresser and pulled it on. Hatter straightened off the door,
ready to go.

“
Fine.” I tried not to
convey the fact that I didn’t have the energy to fight with them
over it. “But Sunny should stay.”

“
She should,” Hatter
agreed.

“
No way.” She was already
shaking her head, making her brown curls bounce. “Not happening. I
go on the hunts, remember? That was our deal.”

“
When it was just the
three of us looking for her.” Hatter’s scar twitched. “It’s safer
here.”

“
Oh, really?” Sunny fired
back, squaring off with him.

My brows rose at her tone, and I had
the urge to slow clap for her.

“
What about Luke? Won’t he
be safer here too since he’s practically spewing up a lung every
other minute? Or is it because I’m a girl and he’s a guy? That’s
why it’s safer for me to stay behind?” She spun toward me and I
seriously had to keep myself from taking a step back. “Luke has
pneumonia. He won’t let me treat it, and he’s been taking straight
saliva to keep going since you’ve been gone.”

“
Thanks for throwing me
under the bus, Sunny.” Luke zipped up his jacket.

“
You’re welcome,
idiot.”

Their mutual hostility shocked me, but
before I could comment, Ghost’s muffled voice came from the other
side of the door. “Miss?”

“
What?” Hatter called
back, snapping off the word with a healthy dose of
hostility.

“
It’s time.”

Ignoring everyone, I went to the
closet next to the door to the bathroom and riffled through the
hanging clothes. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew these
were likely my mother’s, but I didn’t let myself think about it. I
couldn’t yet. The skin over my heart hadn’t healed enough to hold
me together. Even the scent wafting out of the narrow, little space
was enough to tug at the stitches.

Was that what she’d smelled
like?

I shoved the thought away and grabbed
the first clothes I found: a pair of jeans, a button-up blue plaid
shirt, a red wool coat, and tall leather boots. Hatter opened the
door for Ghost.

“
Is she
coming?”

“
We’re coming,” he said.
“Just getting ready.”

“
Okay.”

As I went into the bathroom to change
out of the stiff, scratchy scrubs someone had dressed me in when I
came here, Sunny and Hatter went across the hall to their room to
grab their jackets. Luke stayed behind, standing between the door
and me. While I changed, I kept my eyes averted from the large
mirror above the simple porcelain vanity. No frills, I noticed,
just function. The only thing in my mother’s bathroom that
resembled comfort came from the antique claw-foot tub with an array
of dusty candles and half-empty bottles of bath wash. I imagined
her in here, soaking after a long hunt, with her feet propped up on
the tub’s edge and her hair piled into a messy bun on top of her
head.

To distract myself, I called out to
Luke through the bathroom’s open door, “You’re sick,
then?”

“
She
exaggerated.”

“
You’re full of
shit.”

No response, but I could picture his
grumpy, brooding face, his brow creased into tanned wrinkles. If
we’d been back at the university, before all this, he would’ve
snapped something back at me, likely calling me some name, and I
would’ve called him something else. It would’ve gone on until one
of us kissed the other and we ended up in bed. Instead, after a
long silence, during which I’d buttoned up the jeans, which fit
well, and pulled on the red coat, I said, “You should let her treat
you.”

“
There’s no
time.”

I leaned over and pulled on the boots,
zipping them up over the jeans. When that was done, I yanked my
hair into a ponytail and walked out of the bathroom. In front of
Luke, I leveled a hard stare on him. “I know what you’re going to
do.”

His eyes narrowed. “What’s
that?”

“
You’re going to make Thad
pay for waiting to get me.”

The way his face went carefully
neutral told me all I needed to know. Luke was never neutral. But
this wasn’t his fight. I didn’t even know if it was mine. Things
between Thad and I were shaky at best, but if I was right about the
reasons he’d changed his name and how he’d regretted having to
wait, then it wasn’t him Luke should hate.

It was my father. The man I was
moments away from meeting.

“
Don’t do it,” I
said.

“
He deserves to hurt as
much as you did—and more.” His fingertips started tapping against
each other in their odd rhythm. I heard his calluses scraping
against each other.

“
You’re not going to touch
him. I mean it. It wasn’t his call. I’ll deal with
this.”

Luke rounded on me as I tried to step
around him, but he didn’t touch me. “You mean you’ll deal with your
father. How are you going to do that?” His brows spiked. He was
mocking me. “By helping him hunt? You shouldn’t go out there with
him. He can’t be trusted. He’s proved that.”

“
Maybe you should have
thought about this when Sunny offered to treat you. But you didn’t.
So now you’re in no condition to stop me, are you? And you’re in no
condition to take on Thad in a fight or whatever you had planned.
Next time, you might want to consider not being such an asshole and
listening to Sunny, huh? And stop taking the saliva. You’re going
to kill yourself.”

I stepped around him and headed toward
the door. Luke followed me, his teeth gritted against the words I
knew he wanted to say. Just outside the door, Hatter must have
heard our exchange, because he huffed out a laugh. “Do you want
your balls back now or later, brother?”

The fuming vibrations coming off Luke
made the hairs on my arms stand on end. I used to crave this
feeling from him, of pushing him to the brink. It excited me, and
it terrified me now to realize it still did.

Luke Aultstriver still got to
me.

“
I don’t think this is
what Hex intended,” Ghost said to us as we converged on him in the
hall.

“
We don’t give a fuck,”
Luke growled.

“
Language,” Sunny snapped
and led the way down the hall.

S E V E N

Ollie

W
e separated at the stairs leading down into the warehouse. No
one was around to stop Sunny, Hatter, and Luke from following me
outside, but they hung back to keep from spooking Hex and calling
too much attention to themselves.

The metal stairs rang out as I
followed Ghost down. The smells of oil and sawdust filled my nose
as we went. The air, cool and damp from the large, single-paned
windows that lined the walls, barely circulated down here. Boards
had been nailed across the windows in an attempt at defense. I
didn’t like the slap-dash execution, especially with no one left
behind to guard the house besides a young boy. It was like the
halflings were inviting trouble, especially since they hunted
rogues.

The ’swangs retaliated against their
own kin—their half kin—the way they’d retaliated against
Peg.

I hadn’t thought much about her or
Coldcrow since Barrow, and I didn’t have time to now, no matter how
much the thought of my old professor cut at me. She’d been the
first to know what I was, and she’d tried to help me
anyway.

Ghost and I reached the bottom of the
stairs, and as my boot heels clicked across the oil-stained
concrete, I saw a shadow silhouetted against the open bay door. A
human-shaped shadow, because the light behind him was still less
than an hour before twilight, the sun hanging persistently above
Anchorage’s skyline like an angry orange-red ball.

The shadow shifted and turned around,
watching us approach. Ghost stopped halfway across the warehouse,
and I felt his eyes between my shoulder blades as I walked on. I
stepped onto the bay’s loading dock and looked up at my
father.

“
You’re wearing her
jacket.”

I’d begun to think my memory of him
sitting beside me right after my arrival in Anchorage was a dream,
but he was the same as my pain-clouded and sedative-riddled mind
had remembered.

I shouldn’t have let him talk. Right
away, I should have demanded he tell me why he’d waited—how he
could do that to his daughter—but my anger and fire toward him
dried up with every passing moment around him. He intimidated
me.

“
You’re not ticking,” I
said instead.

“
We can turn it off and on
whenever we want.”

His mouth hooked into a
smile, and I studied him, looking for our similarities. His face
was oval-shaped and full of sharp angles, with cheekbones models
would slay for. His nose and mouth were almost pretty and feminine
in their pert, bow-like shape, but his eyes ruined everything that
suggested he was
human
. The blackness of his irises was too absolute and the silver
flecks around his pupils were too otherworldly to be real. Slashing
dark brows rose, but his porcelain skin didn’t wrinkle.

“
What do you think? Do I
look like your monster?”

I pretended like I didn’t have to peel
my eyes away from his face as I turned to button up my jacket and
tighten my ponytail. Fidgeting, I knew, and I hoped he couldn’t see
how my hands shook. There was something about his mouth and jaw.
Something about the tilt at the corner of his eyes. Something that
reminded me of my own reflection.

“
You look like someone’s
monster,” I said.

He let out a huff of air that might
have been a laugh. From the corner of my eye, I noted his thick
cargo-like pants, which looked military grade, tucked into the tops
of his shit-kicker, steel-toe boots. He wore no jacket against the
chilly Alaskan air, only a fitted shirt with the sleeves pushed up
over forearms etched with lean muscles.

He stepped off the loading dock and
fell nearly five feet, landing on his toes without a sound. He
reached a hand up to help me down and asked, “Are you well enough
to walk?”

Ignoring his hand and the dock’s edge,
I walked over to the side and down the steps. Without waiting, I
started up the slightly sloped driveway toward the street, where
lampposts hummed out a soft, warm glow in the pre-dusk
light.

“
You should warn Thad to
stop treating me like his patient.”

Hex caught up to me in a second. One
moment he wasn’t beside me, and then he was, with a breeze slightly
rustling the ends of my hair from his speed. I prayed he couldn’t
hear how my heart hammered in my chest. I hoped the stitches would
hold, or else I might spill out right here in the
street.

“
I’ll remember that,” he
said. “Go on and ask your questions, Olesya. That’s why we’re out
here.”

“
It’s Ollie,” I said.
“Just Ollie.”

“
Of course.”

I heard the smile in his voice, but I
didn’t look up at him to confirm it. He stood nearly a head above
my eye line, and it felt like a weakness to have to look up at him.
I hated it.

I hated that I still couldn’t ask why
he’d waited. Most of all, I hated that I was terrified of his
answer.

A swirl of lavender and
lemon reached my nose as the red jacket shifted around my hips. My
mother’s scent. I knew Hex smelled it too. I needed to start with
an easy question, because even now, thoughts of my mother
threatened to muddle my head, and the biggest question of all,
the
why did you wait
, pressed down on me like ten fathoms of water above my head.
I couldn’t breathe beneath it all.

“
When will you change?” I
asked—another cop out.

We turned at the street and headed
deeper into the old district, where the warehouses looked more and
more abandoned. Homeless people stared out from the bays as we
passed.

“
I have some control over
it, but when it’s fully dark, I go.” His voice curved around each
syllable with the faintest hint of an accent I couldn’t
place.