by Meg Collett
“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.
“How does it happen?”
“You mean do I grow hair and nails like a werewolf? Like in the movies?”
He was looking down at me again, probably smiling if I was right about the lighter way he spoke. I wondered if I was surprising him or impressing him. Making him happy. Proud. I clenched my jaw. “You know what I mean.”
The only sound came from our boots on the chipped sidewalk. From my guess, he wore no weapons. His hands hung relaxed and loose at his sides, our speed casual. He didn’t peer into the dark shadows between the buildings or worry about the broken windows overhead as we walked. We were in a part of the city where tax dollars weren’t wasted on streetlights, and I recalled a walk similar to this in Kodiak, when I killed my first ’swang in an unlit stretch of town.
“I haven’t thought about it in a long time, but I imagine it’s like blinking. At least, that’s what it feels like to me. In that tiny millisecond when I close my eyes, I know myself as one thing and the world around me goes dark, temporarily lost. In that in-between time, I change. I open my eyes and find myself something else and surrounded by shadows.”
I understood that almost all too well. It felt like I’d opened my eyes to find I was a completely different type of person—a monster, even. “You always come out of the shadows?”
“Always. Remember this, Ollie,” he said, the smile gone from his voice. “In that moment of change, when the darkness is solidifying us into something else and we’ve been transported into the shadows, we are at our weakest. If you wait long enough, away from the light, the monster will come. You can kill it easily then by sliding a dagger into its still-forming heart.”
* * *
Sunny
We left the warehouse with little fuss from Ghost, though he watched us until we were out of sight, his weirdly light hair a glowing beacon. Hex and Ollie had stayed on the district’s main street, so we crossed one block over and followed their voices pinging off the broken walls and empty buildings of this forgotten place.
“Can you hear what they’re saying?” Hatter asked Luke, who stalked a few paces ahead of us, his eyes darting to every break in the windows or buildings so he could get a glance of Ollie.
His silence was answer enough, as was the tense, rippling anger coming off him. He hated this.
“They sound calm enough,” I said. “No one’s raising their voice. Ollie knows we’re close. She’ll call out if she needs us.”
Luke spun around and hissed, “No talking. He’ll hear us.”
I rolled my eyes at his back, which he’d already turned on us. I highly doubted Hex didn’t know we were out here.
Up ahead, the street dead-ended at another warehouse. Luke paused and looked around, evaluating what to do next. Ollie and Hex were still just one road over, with a hodgepodge of buildings between us. Their voices grew fainter until we couldn’t hear them.
“Over here,” Hatter called softly. He was standing by a narrow alley between the dead-end building and the one next to it. Glass crunched below his neon, peach-colored sneakers. Through the darkness, I could just make out the shiny sticker on his snapback hat sitting backward on his head. He waved us over.
Luke went instantly, but I lifted my head to the sky. I couldn’t see the sun over the building towering in front of us, but I sensed its sinking path. I tracked it by the number of goose bumps rising on my arms. Nighttime was barreling toward us.
“Maybe we should double back to the street they’re on.” I bit my lip and remained rooted to the spot.
“Ollie said to keep our distance,” Hatter said.
“But that rogue—”
“Let’s go!” Luke headed deep inside the narrow alley that wound deeper into the southern part of the district.
“It doesn’t feel right,” I said to Hatter, who was waiting at the mouth of the buildings. The bad feeling sank, cold and wet, deep into my gut.
“Sunny . . .”
Luke’s footsteps grew distant. Hatter glanced toward the alley, and I knew from his worried expression that Luke was out of sight. I sighed and started forward, mumbling my grandmother’s ward against evil under my breath.
“It’ll be okay,” Hatter said as I passed, his hand going to the small of my back, but even as he said the words, he glanced behind us, toward the way we’d come, as if he expected something to be following us—like he had a bad feeling too.
I went into the alley, angling sideways so I could fit, and Hatter brought up the rear.
The space stank of stale garbage and urine. Something scuttled by, darting between trash piles. I shuddered and kept going, following the line of light to the end.
On the other side, Hatter and I stepped out into another break between buildings, but this one was an old, chipped parking lot with sections of pavement bent up from the ground and poking into the air. Damage from the earthquake, as if it had happened yesterday. In the direction we needed to go, a tall wall blocked off the side and corner of the lot.
“We have to go this way,” Luke called from across the lot, his voice echoing off the alley behind us. He stood at the juncture of another set of buildings.
“Shit. Where are the streets?” Hatter hissed under his breath.
I scanned the other buildings and saw a blocked-off road that headed back the way we’d come, but a few blocks in the wrong direction. Clearly, Luke didn’t want to double back.
“We should head back and just go to the main road,” I said to Hatter.
Across the way, Luke gave up on us and disappeared into the passageway. Hatter cursed again, foully. The tips of my ears burned at the string of words, but my belly warmed. My mother and grandmother hadn’t raised me to be turned on by a scarred man with a dirty mouth, but, hot dang, it did it for me.
“Come on,” he said and took my hand, towing me across the lot. I nearly tripped over a crack in the pavement. Hatter lifted me up and put his arm around me, guiding me forward so he was positioned slightly behind me, but also close enough to pull me out of the way should something get by Luke.
We picked up our pace and nearly ran across the lot.
This alley smelled much like the last, and when we came out on the other side, Luke was waiting. “It’s a fucking maze out here. We have to keep going south or double back.”
“We should double back,” I said quickly, hoping he was seeing reason. Olli
e and Hex were long gone.
“Unless this comes out on the other side of that factory.” Luke lifted his chin toward the building blocking our path back to the east, where the sky was mostly dark. The burnt-orange sunset had faded into a sepia-toned burnout. We were losing time.
“Or maybe we made a wrong turn and should go back.”
“Or maybe something is happening right now and Ollie needs us,” Luke pressed, giving me a dark look.
Hatter tensed. “Dude—”
“Hex wouldn’t do anything,” I said to Luke.
“And you know this how?” he fired back.
I threw up my hands. “Why would he go through all this trouble if he was just going to kill her?”
“For the satisfaction of doing it himself?” Luke nearly shouted back at me.
“Watch it,” Hatter growled, but I ignored him.
“Is that why you’re here too?” I pushed past Hatter and shoved Luke. “You stupid old cow! You dumb sack, piece of poo, pile of crap man!”
“Hey—” Hatter started again.
Luke sneered. “Wow. I’m really shaking in my boots over here. You really got me.”
I lunged again, but Hatter caught me and tried to speak over us. “Do you hear—”
“I swear,” I hissed, swinging for Luke, “I’ll kick your balls so hard you’ll taste your own children—”
“Shut up!” Hatter yelled. He spun me behind him and angled his body toward the buildings to our right, which, now that I looked, were burnt husks, charred black and crumbling from a fire that must have burned hot for a long time, judging from the mangled beams.
In the silence, Luke heard what Hatter had moments ago. Both men were reaching for weapons that weren’t there.
Only then, between my pounding heartbeats, did I hear it too.
A very quiet, almost silent, tick tock.
E I G H T
Ollie
“If you were to change now, how far away would you go?” I asked.
“To the closest gathering of shadows.”
I chewed on his words, turning them over and over in my mind. The questions popped up one after the other, but I picked the one that scared me least. “Why would you tell me this? Isn’t it a secret?”
“We’re not on different sides of the fence here. We both want the same things.”
He said “here” in a way that suggested he was thinking about fall break at Fear University, when we had indeed been on separate sides of the fence. Maybe something wasn’t physically between us, but I felt the wall nonetheless.
“What do you want, then? Ghost said you and the halflings hunt every night. That you’re hunting rogues? What’s the point? What is the ‘balance’ idea? And did Irena really start this place? Did she really believe humans and ’swangs could coexist?”
I took a breath, annoyed with myself. I’d lost my cool, and I hazarded a glance up at him. He was staring straight ahead, tracking the sun’s height above the buildings. A breeze threaded through his long hair, sending it across his face. The sky deepened from red to burnt orange to purple at its farthest corners. The sun sank early and fast this far north. There wasn’t much time left.
I blinked and he was looking me in the eye. My attention snagged on those silver flecks, and I had to force myself to look away.
We’d come to an opening between the buildings that contained an old playground. One of the long-ago businesses housed in these buildings must have had a day care for its workers and this was where the children had played. The decayed slide looked jagged and sharp, like an infection waiting to happen, and the chains holding cracked swings clanked rustily in the wind. Hex stopped and set his foot against an old tire. He took a deep breath, his nostrils pulling in tight as he inhaled long and hard. I wondered what he smelled.
I took a few steps away from the tire and sat down on an old railroad crosstie so I could watch his face. Also, I wanted to hide the fact that my breathing was labored and tired from the walk and the muscles in my legs were shaking from the tiny effort.
When he turned back to me, he said, “We try for balance, Olesya—”
“It’s just Ollie.”
Below the orange sky, the silver flecks in his eyes danced and sparked. “We try for balance. We hunt the aswangs who take too much and cross the line we govern, but we also hunt the hunters, the university killers, who kill too freely and without conscience.”
I had expected Ghost to tell me the romanticized version, but I was hearing it straight from Hex’s mouth, this idea of balance.
“We have to feed. Fear is the only thing that sustains us, you see, but it doesn’t have to be a devouring of flesh or soul. We can take bits and pieces from someone without them even noticing. We stick to the shadows and follow behind the humans who are afraid their spouses are cheating on them, or that they might have failed an exam, or that a diagnosis might shorten their life. We skim off the top of that fear and take only what we need. The ’swangs like us stay hidden and quiet. We keep to ourselves. The only things we hunt to kill are the ones who go beyond the balance of nature.”
“And the halflings?”
Hex sighed, his narrow chest and shoulders stretching out for a long moment before releasing almost, but not quite, into a slump. “I protect them from people like Dean and Killian Aultstriver. I give them a place where they’re safe enough to accept who and what they are. Those who want to stay will stay and hunt with my pack. Those who don’t go with the knowledge of the rules and how to conduct themselves.” He paused, his next words hanging heavily in the air between us. He lifted his eyes to mine and said, “Your mother really did start this place, Ollie. While she was still hunting for Dean, she bought this place in secret and kept it hidden. When she was bringing in live ’swangs for Dean’s experiments, she was also creating a network of like-minded individuals and finding halflings. She only brought him the rogues, the worst ’swangs, because even then she understood a balance could be achieved.”
“She was finding halflings? How?”
Hex’s shoulders straightened, and he slid his hands into the back pockets of his pants. “Halflings have happened naturally since the beginning. Pairings between humans and aswangs happen more often than you might think. The resulting halflings are just very rare, and those who live long enough become slippery eels of survival in order to stay alive for one more night.”
My heart was pounding again. Rules of nature. Natural halflings. My mother. My mother.
“Irena,” I said, my voice cracking a tiny amount as I caught another whiff of her scent. Her red jacket was quickly becoming my most valued possession. “How did she do all this and still stay with the university?”
Hex turned his face into the breeze again. The sky darkened as the sun dipped below the buildings. Twilight was nearly over. Hex’s shadow stretched longer and longer behind him.
“That’s why I brought you out here,” he said, still breathing deeply, his focus far away from me. “We need to talk about your mother.”
“I want to know her.” He still wasn’t looking at me. “Hex.”
Slowly, he turned away from whatever he’d caught in the wind and focused a dark stare my way. The lingering light left deep hollows below his eyes. “I know you do. You need to know her, Ollie. She was a magnificent woman. You can learn a lot from her.”
His chin jerked again toward the other direction, toward the south and deeper into the empty warehouses. I imagined I heard his bones tightening inside him. He looked ready to disappear right in front of me.
“What is it? What are you smelling?”
“I want you to stay,” he said like he hadn’t heard me. “I want you to hunt with me every night and learn about what we’re trying to accomplish out here. I want you to see how wrong Fear University is. I want you to understand how that school makes unnatural killers. In exchange, I’ll tell you about your mother.”
I stood from the crosstie and turned toward the south, inching my way closer beside him. The ha
irs along the back of my neck stood on end and my hand itched to hold a stingray whip.
“That’s it? That’s your deal?” I asked. It was too easy. He wasn’t gaining anything.
“When you understand our ways, when you know what your mother fought for, you will return to the university on the night of Killian Aultstriver’s trial, when all the hunter families have gathered”—he pulled his attention away and looked down at me, and I looked up at him—“and you will help me kill everyone in power there. Dean. Killian. The professors. The hunters. And we will take that school and make it into our own.”
My scalp prickled from his words and from the southern breeze.
I kept my eyes wide and unblinking.
“I’m not that kind of killer.”
* * *
Sunny
“They’re close.”
Tick
“What ya thinking, brother?” Hatter had me behind him, his arm pressing me back as he and Luke fanned out in a low crouch, hands spread wide. Their eyes scanned every coming shadow. Overhead, the sun’s final rays of light disappeared.
Tock
“Alley.”
“Make it?”
Tick tock
“Only option.”
I glanced back. The alley we’d come through was across the lot. We’d have to turn our backs on the approaching aswangs, their ticking fading even as I turned back. My hand found Hatter’s.
“Get ready to run,” he whispered.
My heart thudded up my throat, and my spine pulsed with a crushing tightness that stole my breath.
“Keep her in the middle,” Luke said, taking a step back.
I didn’t want to think about the fact that I could see the points of Luke’s shoulder blades through his jacket or hear the sound of his wet, rattling breaths. He was at half strength, probably less without his daily dose of saliva. None of us had weapons.
Tick
We all froze, waiting for the tock. It never came. The sound was gone. There was no more time.