The Killing Season (31 page)

Max came back over with another syringe. More ’swang saliva from the numerous vials Killian had given him.

He was worried because I’d stopped screaming there at the end, but it wasn’t because I’d stopped feeling the pain.

I was thinking about Luke. Luke and Sunny and Hatter and Thad and Jolene. Peg. Coldcrow. Mr. Abbot. Dean. Fear University. My dorm room. The gym. My squeaky blue locker where I’d kept a bottle of coconut body mist to spray on myself before training with Luke. I thought a lot about Luke’s bedroom, and how it felt when he held me. Kissed me. Loved me.

All the things that made me feel safe. Whether it was Luke’s kind of safety: loyalty, love, passion. Or Dean’s kind: revenge, anger, the old Ollie that got even. I remembered all of it during the cutting when I forgot myself.

Then the needle pricked my skin and Max pressed the saliva into my blood stream.

I felt it this time.

I began to shiver, the cold in the small room somehow colder. The blood running down my leg turned into tiny shards of glass scraping across my skin. Even the gown clenched me too tightly.

Everything lit up with a pain that shined bright, bright red. So red, so sharp. I started crying, and then I cried harder because even the tears hurt.

“Do you feel it yet?” Max whispered against my ear. His words pierced me, stabbed into my brain. “Do you remember what we shared that night in Daddy’s basement? Are we there yet?”

I forced myself to think of Luke, how his touch never hurt me, never broke me. Only when I had his face pulled up perfectly in my mind did I shake my head.

“I want to stop, Ollie,” Max begged. “We’ve been up all night. Let me stop. Please.”

“You’re going to need more than just some little knives,” I said, drawing a deep breath, “to break me.”

He stared at me for a long moment before nodding slightly. “Okay.” He wiped the blood off his hands. “Okay. But I want you to know I don’t want to break you, Ollie. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m making you better.
Better
. A good girl, like Daddy would have wanted.”

I lifted my head and blinked away Luke’s face until I stared straight at Max. “Fuck your daddy. He screamed like a little pussy when I smashed his skull in.”

Max’s fist crashed into my cheek with a crack that echoed in my head and down my spine. He spun away on his heel, fists clenched, shoulders heaving as he tried to get himself under control. I worked to stay conscious, to ready myself for the storm. Because the cutting had just been the warmup. I wasn’t even close to the bad part yet.

Max went back to the kitchen, to his bag of tools. Again I didn’t watch. Knew it was better that way. My eye was already swelling shut anyway.

He approached me with a thin metal device in his left hand and a narrow leather strap in the other. He held the metal part up for me to see. “Satan’s Tail,” he said.

The metal rod was as narrow as my pinky, as long as the length of my hand. Each end forked into two razor-sharp prongs. I swallowed. Mr. Taber hadn’t had this during my time in the basement.

“I saw one at a museum in San Francisco. It was used long, long ago by righteous men on blasphemers and liars,” Max said as he wrapped the leather strap around my neck and secured it into place. “It inspired me. When I looked at it, I saw you, Ollie. I knew it was perfect for you.”

He attached the metal rod to the leather collar. When I tried to look down, to watch his hands, one of the forked ends pierced the tender flesh beneath my chin. At the same time, the other end stabbed into the thin skin on my sternum, between my collar bones. I opened my mouth to gasp at the pain, but the prongs jabbed into me again. I snapped my jaw closed and jerked my chin up fast as lightning.

“See?” Max smiled, pleased. “Now you can’t say bad things that will get you in trouble.”

I looked at him, a trembling working up my legs, my neck already starting to ache from keeping my chin up.

He stepped behind me. I tensed, but he didn’t come close to my body. Instead, a scraping sounded through the small room, and when he came back into view, he was pushing something to my feet. I couldn’t look down as he maneuvered it into place beneath me, but I felt the cool bite of metal on my bare feet. Scared, I pulled myself up on my hand restraints, accidentally causing the forks to bite back into my skin.

A trickle of blood ran down my neck.

Max went outside, letting in a blast of icy air that rustled my gown across my body, and brought back a shovelful of snow, which he spread below my feet in the metal pan. Before he’d even stepped away, the frosty temperature was making my feet burn and prickle. I pulled myself up higher on the rope, enough to keep me out of most of the snow.

I stared at Max and waited.

He picked up his tiny knife, the one responsible for the countless tiny cuts across my body, and said, “Now. Let’s try this again.”

* * *

Sunny

It was dinner time, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of eating. Ollie had been missing for twenty-four hours almost exactly.

Throughout the day, Luke and Hatter had scoured every map of the grounds, getting a plan of attack for when the police arrived on their snowcat. It was a slow process. Too slow. Barrow knew enough about what we did that when the cops finally arrived in the afternoon, they didn’t ask too many questions. They took Ollie and Max’s descriptions with efficiency borne from centuries of survival in this white land full of monsters. Then they and Luke, Hatter, and the other Barrow hunters had disappeared into the dark, riding out on a machine that hopefully had strong enough doors to keep out the ’swangs.

A madman had taken Ollie. Hidden her somewhere up here where we couldn’t track because of the storm. And as we searched for her, another monster all together would be hunting us.

A bitter, acrid taste filled the back of my mouth as I sat across from Nyny, the only other person in the entire Barrow base. Every now and then, she would look up at me, her lips cracking apart to ask a question, but she always bit it back, like she couldn’t figure out how to phrase it.

We were alone, barricaded in, with guns laid out on the table like silverware. I had to make Hatter leave me behind with just Nyny to watch my back. All the other hunters were combing the tundra or stationed at Barrow’s airport.

No word from Thad.

“I had a sister once, you know,” Nyny said, startling me.

“Really?”

She laid her arm on the table and showed me the underside of her wrist. In delicate, scrolling letters was a name, but she pulled her hand back before I could read it. “She was four years younger than me, but she was going to be the hunter in the family. I always preferred books to fighting, but she trained every day even though she was too young to understand. When she was nine, my parents went out for a raid in my village in northern Russia. I was supposed to stay awake and protect her, even though she was the one sleeping with a wooden toy sword, but I fell asleep studying. When I woke, the ’swang had already eaten all her fear, drained her completely dry, and was starting on her stomach. I think it was the sound of its teeth on her bones that woke me.”

I shuddered, horrified at the story. Nyny stared down at her wrist in her lap, her eyes faraway. “I’m sorry,” I said, my words barely more than a stutter.

“I’ve spent my entire life dedicated to learning why aswangs kill. Sometimes, I think I’m getting close,” she said. She glanced up, her round eyes meeting mine. She didn’t blink. “But there would never be enough time to understand why humans do what we do to each other.”

The silence after her words stretched out, our food long cold and untouched. There was nothing to say, nothing to do. A chill had swept into the base that had nothing to do with the blustering, arctic winds outside. It settled deep in my bones.

Finally, Nyny asked, “What will happen if they don’t find her?”

I met her eyes, but didn’t answer. She shifted in her seat, her lavender hair like a wilted flower. Only Luke, Hatter, Thad, and I knew the truth about Ollie. To everyone else, she was still Fear University’s saving grace. Her reputation was the only reason everyone else worried about her. They didn’t understand Ollie’s fears, the nightmares that made her twitch and cry out at night until I stroked her hair and held her tight long enough. They only saw the warrior, the killer, the girl who felt no pain.

They didn’t know the truth.

Ollie Andrews lived with a pain none of us understood. Or ever would. And after tonight, something twisted and wrong would take her pain and make it so much worse.

* * *

Ollie

Where are you?

I’m right here, baby.

It’s too dark.

Luke kissed my lips, careful of my split one, his touch so gentle and sweet that my eyes watered and my jaw ached.
Can you see me now?

Always.

“Ollie.”

I opened my eyes and Luke disappeared. Max stood in front of me. The skin beneath my chin pulsed in echo to my heartbeat. A fire blazed on my chest, like the metal rod had been dipped in flames until it was molten hot. Max hadn’t given me another dose of ’swang saliva yet, and the pain I felt was just heat, and I could stand the heat. I was used to it.

I couldn’t feel my feet, though, heat or not. But that was old news.

I’d stopped trying to hold myself up.

“Ollie,” Max repeated, his voice shriller, his eyes red-rimmed from exhaustion. We hadn’t slept yet.

“Sir,” I said, saying the words with as little movement in my jaw as possible. But the prongs still stabbed me—my chin and sternum—and the flames spiked higher.

“Do you remember that night in the basement? What you felt?”

I stared up at the ceiling, chin high and jaw tight. Luke’s face reformed in the darkness. “Always,” I said, speaking loud and clear enough that the forked prongs stabbed me.

Max shifted his weight, making the floorboards squeak beneath his boots. He had to be careful or he’d slip in the blood. “I don’t think you mean that the right way.”

He sounded like a pouting child.

I smiled at my conjured vision of Luke. “I don’t.”

“Why are you doing this?” Max pleaded. “Why are you making this so hard on us?”

I stayed silent, the forks pressing against my skin like a threat. In front of me, Max visibly withered, his shoulders curling forward, his hands dragging down his face. He dropped the knife onto the floor and sighed.

He took me down from the ropes for the first time since we’d left the base and gave me water and food and cleaned my wounds. Every time he needed me to move, he had to arrange and force my limbs into position because I was too weak.

When he laid down beside me, propped up on one elbow so he could stare at me, his other hand on my hip, he said, “I love you, Ollie.”

He kissed me.

His finger drew a small, slow circle at my hip, his eyes never leaving mine. He smiled.

“We’re not there yet, but I promise you’ll remember and understand.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, my voice hoarse. He reached over and got me another drink of water from the glass on the nightstand.

When I was finished, he took his time kissing away the water that had spilled from my lips.

“I love you so much.”

* * *

Sunny

Another night passed, marking Ollie’s disappearance for forty-eight hours.

The morning arrived with no sun. With no Ollie. With no Hatter or Luke or anyone. Then the afternoon. Evening. A couple hours of civil twilight. Then night again.

Another night passed.

Then another.

And another.

The hunters finally stumbled back, exhausted and famished. Some had frostbite. The ones who didn’t were lucky. Luke disappeared into Ollie’s room without eating. Hatter and I stared at each other across from the table without eating.

“I wonder what he’s doing to her right now?” I asked quietly. The other hunters at the table—Haze, Eve, and Nyny—flinched at my words.

“Don’t think like that, Sunny,” Hatter said. “We’ll find her.”

We hadn’t told anyone else about Thad leaving to hunt for her, only that he’d returned to the university to update Dean on his prized possession’s disappearance. It wasn’t a hard lie to maintain; Dean had been furious when he learned Max kidnapped Ollie. But there was no sign of Thad. No word. He or Ollie could be dead. Or they were somewhere far away.

“I hope she kills Max. I pray she does.”

I kept praying that same prayer as another week passed.

Then two weeks passed.

No Ollie. No Thad. Dead or alive, we had no clue.

Dean’s hunters came to collect Killian for his trial. The man they pulled out of the base’s cellar was half-starved, half-mad. A scraggly beard concealed his face, but not his snapping, electric eyes. Nyny and I trailed after the hunters, watching as they carried Killian to the front door.

My prayers for good timing weren’t answered.

Just before the hunters reached the door, it swung open and Luke, Hatter, and the Barrow hunters stepped inside.