Monster Mine (28 page)

“
I won’t ever forget what
you did. This existence between you and I that we’re sketching out
tonight isn’t about forgiveness. It isn’t about trust or
understanding. It’s about change. When that change is accomplished,
then we can finish this between us.”

He took the last sip of scotch. The
glass rattled when he sat it down on his desk. “You have halflings?
Natural ones, like you?”

“
I have individuals I
intend to protect. They won’t be part of your studies. You only get
that from me if they volunteer.”

“
You plan on bringing the
aswangs in here, inside the walls?”

“
No.” His relief was such
that he almost fell out of his chair. “But they’ll be near. And
your hunters will have a new set of rules to follow. The university
might get pretty empty for a while.”

“
And Hex. He’s coming here
because you aligned with me?”

“
I aligned with the
university
,” I said.
“Hex’s plan didn’t work for me, so I made my own, but he was coming
here no matter what.”

“
What will he do?” Dean
asked. Atop his jumbled, cluttered desk, he shoved papers aside,
exposing a clipped-down map of the school that included all
perimeter fences, entrances, rook’s nests, and guard
towers.

“
He’ll fight,” I
said.

“
How many?” Dean asked,
not looking up from his map.

“
Enough.”

“
Can we win if we have
enough time to prepare?”

“
The walls will help,” I
said.

“
But if they get inside
. . .”

“
That won’t happen.” I
braced my hands against his desk, my eyes on the map
too.

“
That’s easy for you to
say.” Dean rubbed at his temples. “You haven’t fought against Hex.
He’s not normal.”

“
I have,
actually.”

Dean jerked his head up.
“How?”

“
I trained with him,” I
said. “I know how to fight him, and I will. He’ll never get through
the gates because I’ll go outside to meet him. This will end before
it ever gets to the walls.”

My fate, there it was.

I might have lost sight of it during
the weeks I’d spent in Anchorage with Hex, training with him and
having a father in him, but when he told me about waiting to save
my mother, I’d known it would come to this.

To killing my father.

“
You are so similar to
her.”

It took me a moment to place the
warmth in his voice. He meant my mother.

“
Our faces may look
alike,” I said, “and our lives may have run an eerily similar
course, but I am not my mother. I do not break as easily, and I
will not fail where she failed. You should remember that when you
look at me and see her.”

“
Yes,” he said, directing
the words down to the map, “I will.”

“
Now, there’s one more
thing I need from you tonight. Consider it a goodwill gesture of
your agreement.”

N I N E T E E N

Ollie

T
he hotel sat on the corner of the street. Street lamps and
interior lights warmed the front yard and made the snow look
orange. It was one of those chain deals, nice enough on the
outside, but generic and stale and sterile smelling on the
inside.

In the van Dean had lent me, I drove
to a spot in the parking lot where there wasn’t any light to
illuminate me.

It hadn’t been hard to find the
family. The father was the loud, boisterous type, the kind of man
who needed to hear his voice to feel powerful. He and his quiet
wife, who stuck to the safety of his shadow, went to their car not
long after I’d found them. Across town, in the hotel Dean had told
me they were staying in, the car was parked next to the back door,
which he held open, waiting on his wife. She was carrying two
overnight bags while he held a can of beer. From this distance, I
couldn’t hear what he was saying to her as she passed, but her body
stiffened, her nod too fast and quick for her to be at
ease.

As the door slowly swung closed, I
bounded forward. My long legs got me there with plenty of time to
spare, and I let the door close just enough so the lock clicked,
but not enough for it to snick into place. I waited a breath and
then opened the door a bit wider.

The couple went into a room only a few
doors down from where I waited. Checking the parking lot one last
time, I went inside.

Dean’s goodwill gesture had been to
give me their names and where they were staying, because their
family, like many of the other families who were also staying at
hotels in the city, wasn’t important enough or old enough to
warrant a place at the university for Killian’s trial.

My blood sang to me, needing this,
needing to hurt someone, so I went down the poorly lit beige hall,
knowing I couldn’t stop myself even if I’d wanted to. Besides, he
deserved it.

Men like him would pay.

Outside the door, I heard them milling
around inside. His voice was a low rumble to her lighter one. The
bathroom door opened, a toilet flushed, and then the shower turned
on. The wife, if I had to guess. She probably wanted a moment’s
peace from him, if I’d read her wary glances and tight shoulders
right. And I thought I had.

I knocked softly on the door, just
loud enough for him to hear.

If he checked the peephole, he
wouldn’t think a young, blonde girl was much to worry about. Maybe
he’d seen me on campus. Maybe he thought I was room service in my
dark jeans and leather jacket. Maybe he was an idiot.

The door swung open and I smelled the
beer and cheap yeast on his breath. He’d drunk more than just the
one can in his hand. From the burst vessels on his nose and the
yellow of his eyes, he’d been drinking his entire life without much
time in between.

“
What do you—”

I kicked my boot into the gap between
the jamb and the door. The door banged back and hit his hand. He
dropped his beer. Before he could yelp, I shouldered my way in,
using his backward momentum to move him farther into the room. I
toed the door closed as I glanced at the bathroom door. The shower
was even louder inside the room.

“
What the hell is this?”
the man said, recovering.

My eyes swept back to him. “I know
what you did. What you do. It stops now.”

“
I don’t know—”

I surged forward, the palm of my hand
slamming into his mouth. His upper lip curled beneath the impact
and sliced against his teeth. He stumbled back, hand to mouth,
unsteady on his feet. Not good at taking a punch. Maybe a little
drunk if the swerving car I’d followed was any indication. This was
the hard man, the loud man, who’d threatened his son and cuffed him
too hard on the back of the neck. The man who thought he could
build a warrior to fight monsters, when he was nothing more than a
paunchy gut with soft skin and thin blood.

I growled, pushing him deeper into the
shadows of the room. I didn’t care if he saw my face.

Soon enough, people like him would
know me and what I did to their kind.

“
I’ll call the cops!” He
tried to shout, but the blood inside his mouth made the words
garbled and weak.

“
Do you think they’ll save
you from me?”

I hooked his leg and punched him in
the gut so hard I imagined his spine rattled. He toppled backward
in a huff of lost wind and connected with the desk’s edge in a
crash of splintering wood. I pulled on my silver
knuckles.

His eyes went wild when the blade
flicked out. “Is it money you want?” His bravado started to slip
beneath the shakiness of his voice.

From the bathroom, the shower turned
off and the door opened.

“
Richard?” a woman asked,
sticking her wet, towel-wrapped head out. She saw me, her eyes
widening, and her mouth fell open.

I raised my knife at her as I stood
over her husband. “Go back into the bathroom. Don’t make a
sound.”

“
Wh-what are you
doing?”

“
The university is
officially taking a hard stance on child abuse. On
training
.” I said the
word with a sneer. “Your husband is about to learn what happens
when someone breaks the new rules.”

“
What rules?” the man
yelled. “There are no rules.”

He tried to stand. My fist connected
with his jaw and sent him back into the wall.

“
Go back inside. Close the
door,” I said to the wife.

Still half leaning out of the
bathroom, she looked between her husband and me, her hand wrapped
around her throat.

“
Stephanie,” her husband
rasped, “call the cops.”

Her eyes went to me. Ever so slightly,
she nodded and closed the door.

I turned back to the man. “Richard, is
it?”

I leaned down and reached for his
belt. He cringed back.

“
Do you know who I am?” he
asked, his voice shaking.

I tugged his belt loose and
straightened back into the shadows, towering over him. “Do you know
who I am?”

“
No.”

I tested the leather in my hands.
Strong. Solid. It would hold. “You will.”

I pulled his arms across the desk and
strapped him down. Like a coward, he didn’t fight back. As I
worked, he talked, told me this was a misunderstanding and that I
had the wrong guy. He didn’t even know why I was here, and when his
arms were stretched across the wood, his body leaning forward like
a prone animal before slaughter, he understood my silence and
realized he’d made a mistake.

“
Wait,” he started, voice
rising with panic. “No.”

He jerked against the restraints, but
they held. Satisfaction warmed my belly as I adjusted my fingers in
the knuckles.

“
We have to talk,
Richard.” I let the knuckles slide down my fingers until they were
almost to my nails and the blade became more like a loose knife in
my hand.

“
Okay.” He nodded like
this was some business meeting and he still had some power, even
though he was stretched out with his ass up over a broken desk.
“Let’s talk.”

“
The university is
changing,” I said. “Anyone incapable of adapting to those changes
will be eliminated.”

“
Says who?” He’d bitten
his tongue when I punched him, and it flopped around uselessly in
his mouth.

I used the end of my knife to spread
his fingers wide. “Says me.”

“
Who the hell do you think
you are?” Even now, with my knife between his fingers, he was
trying to intimidate me with that tone he probably used every day
on his son.

I leaned down, eye level, and smiled
at him. My smile wasn’t right these days. Something vital was
missing from my eyes. I saw it every time I looked at Sunny and she
tried to shove down her fear and worry for me. But the way this
man’s eyes turned watery with fear told me I was doing okay. As
long as my sharp edges still terrified, I could make it.

“
Who the hell am I? I’m
the person who’s going to check in on you when you’re sleeping next
to your pretty wife. When you’re showering and you think you’re
alone. When the house goes still and you think you hear something.
When you feel a breath-like breeze across your neck. I’ll be the
person there, just in the shadows, watching you. And if you ever
screw up again, I’ll end you in the worst way. Got it?”

“
Fu—”

I sliced, a quick downward flick of
the knife. He blinked at me, slowly, thickly. Then the pain hit and
he tried to scream, but his tongue was swelling too quickly to make
much of a sound. His body thrashed against the belt holding him
down. Across the floor, his heels grappled for purchase, but he
wasn’t going anywhere. He fought like a feral dog at the end of a
leash.

Between his fingers, the webbed skin
had peeled apart, separating his fingers down to the bone. I moved
my knife to the next set of fingers and waited.

“
Try again,
Richard.”

“
Please.” Bubbles formed
and popped from the bloody spit oozing between his lips. He started
to cry.

“
It’s too late for
apologies.”

“
I can’t take any
more.”

“
I’ve only cut you once,
Richard. You have a lot of fingers left. How much did you make your
son take?” I pressed the knife against his skin. “Did you wait
until he was crying or begging or lying on the floor in a shivering
ball of fear? How much, Richard? How far did you go?”

“
He was too
weak—”

His skin parted like warm butter
against a hot knife. A high-pitched keening emitted from the back
of his throat as he started to rock over his tied hands, blood
dripping in a steady flow.

“
I don’t think your hands
are gonna work too good after this, Richard. You really should try
to understand what I’m saying. Will you hurt your son
again?”