by Meg Collett
I turned away from him and tried to rein back my anger and fear. But before I could launch into my preplanned, well-rehearsed argument to change his mind, Hatter sat down beside me on the bed, the mattress dipping beneath his weight and pulling me toward him.
I let myself slide, using the momentum to ease closer until our legs touched.
He reached across me, and I swore my heart stopped, but he just put his hand on my knee. He smiled and any desire pooling in my stomach dropped away like sinking cement. I knew that look.
“Sunshine.”
I tried to pull away, but his hands went to my wrists and pushed them down onto the bed so that he was practically leaning across me, into my lap.
“You know what’ll happen to me.”
My eyes flashed to his.
I simply snapped.
“Screw you,” I hissed, my mouth inches from his. He nearly fell on top of me from his surprise. “Screw you for giving up. You don’t even care. I think part of you believes you deserve it. Maybe you’re sick enough to even want it. But I don’t. I still care. Doesn’t that matter at all?”
“I—”
“No.” I leaned in closer, my body pressing against his. He tensed, like he wanted to lean back. Well, he’d put himself in this situation, in my lap, so he could deal with it. “You don’t get to talk. You don’t get to say what I feel is wrong. You don’t get to tell me anything. And you most certainly don’t get to die on me.”
Over the past few weeks, an elastic band had worn down inside me, the rubber stretched too thin. It finally snapped. My mother would be so ashamed. But I knew—I knew—this was what I was meant to do. I might never be a good hunter. I accepted that. But I was a damn good healer. I could heal Hatter. I could fix him. I knew it in every part of me that wasn’t tired. That was whole and unsnapped. The best parts of me, the strongest parts, the Ollie-est parts.
I was Sunny Lyons. Sometimes I was the Cowardly Lyon, but not often. Not anymore. I was strong and smart and I knew my purpose. It wasn’t just for Hatter, but for every hunter. For all the ones like Hatter, and for all the ones like me, who loved a Hatter—a Mad Hatter who wouldn’t take a moment to care for himself. So maybe I wasn’t some badass with muscles and a scary smile and scarier scars with a look that could turn a man to stone and who could pull off leather jackets and motorcycle boots and who listened to weird screamo music with the windows down and drove too fast and laughed at the thought of fighting monsters. But I was me.
And that felt like enough.
“It’s—” Hatter started again.
I cut him off—with my mouth.
With. My. Mouth.
The kiss caught him off guard. His grip on my wrists loosened, and he started to pull away, but I wrapped my freed arms around his neck and held on. My lips pressed against the coarse thickness of his scars that mangled the corner of his mouth. In a whoosh, his breath came out against my mouth, shaky and terrified. I smiled and moved in closer.
I threaded my fingers through his hair and flicked out my tongue to trace the seam of his mouth, both sides, showing him his scars didn’t scare me. They never had. He felt too familiar, too much like home, for me to be nervous like I thought I would be.
Somehow, I’d been dreading this moment. This moment when he opened himself to me with a growl-like groan. The moment when he eased me back against the bed and it was just him above me and my frizzy hair and my fogged-up glasses and my duck pajamas and my curvy hips and my not-so-much-a-six-pack stomach. All of it. All the “ands” that ran through my mind to spell out all my insecurities.
I’d feared it so much, but now that it was happening, with his weight against me and his hand on my waist, on my bare skin, I wasn’t afraid at all.
“Sunny,” he said against my mouth.
The rasping need in his voice curled my toes just like in all the romance novels I’d binge read like a cocaine-addicted lab monkey. I pushed my hips up against him and nearly died right there. His hardness pushed back against me, and, and, and, and, and he swiveled it against me, and I think my mind short-circuited and this was it. This was the end, and, oh my God, I was so happy that I would have cried right there had it not made me look like the biggest, craziest person in the world.
He pulled back and I seriously almost cried.
“Sunny,” he said again.
“Hatter.”
I tried to make my voice raspy and ended up nearly coughing.
He winced. “I can’t . . . we shouldn’t . . .”
I sighed and readjusted my glasses. Really, I just wanted to throw them against the wall and flick my hair like some sexy secretary, but I really couldn’t see without them. Like, not at all. Like I could be making out with a raccoon and wouldn’t know.
“Hatter—”
“Don’t call me that.”
My mouth snapped shut. The hurt came quick.
“I mean,” he said, raking a hand over his mouth as if he could still taste me, “I can’t stand you calling me that name right now, during this. Hatter is just a character I created to deal with what I am. He is for everyone else. But between us, I just . . . I just can’t, you know?”
His arm by my head bunched with tightly corded muscles as he held himself up. I tried not to stare. “What do you want me to call you?”
“I want you to call me Hatter, but I need you to know I wasn’t always this person. I’m not ashamed of who I became to survive my parents and this war, but ‘Hatter’ is just a crazy hunter with a manic reaction. When I created him, I never thought I’d be capable of finding someone like you—or loving anyone.”
My heart.
My heart broke.
“My real name is Drew.” He squeezed his eyes shut like the words had almost killed him. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again. “I want you to know that part of me. Who I used to be before I was . . . this.” He opened his eyes and stared down at me. “I want you to know about Drew, about that piece of me I had to hide away.”
His words sounded like he was pleading with me—begging me to see him.
But I already did.
I always had.
I relaxed back against the pillows and smiled up at him. Yes, my glasses were crooked again. Yes, I was wearing duck pajamas. And yes, I would never be as sexy as Ollie, but I saw him.
“I’ve always known,” I said, my finger tracing his mouth, up his scars, and back down again. “You were always mine.”
“Sunny.” He leaned down to kiss me again, his lips grazing mine. “Sunny,” he whispered.
Downstairs, a door slammed and someone screamed, “Hey!”
I pushed against his chest. “Was that Ollie?”
Hatter sat back as I scrambled out from under him. I raced over to the door and threw it open.
“Ollie?” I shouted down the hall.
“Help! Help me!”
My blood fizzed in my veins.
“It’s Ollie,” I shouted back at Hatter, who was still sitting on the edge of my bed, looking vaguely stunned. “Shit,” I hissed to myself. I stuffed my feet into my boots. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Wearing duck pajamas and snow boots, I tore downstairs, shaking the metal stairs so hard I thought they might disconnect from the second floor. “Ollie?” I shouted into the darkness of downstairs. It was still the middle of the night, and I had yet to figure out where the main light switches were for the overhead lights. A bay door was open, and I shivered against the chilly winter air. “Ollie?”
“Over here!”
I spun toward the sound of her voice. She hadn’t even made it halfway across the space before collapsing and curling over herself. She looked up at me, and I caught the wild, frantic gleam in her eyes. Something dark and wet was smeared across her chest.
“Oh my gosh.” I ran to her, falling to my knees and sliding the final few feet, nearly colliding with her. “Are you bleeding? Are you hurt? What happened—”
Then I saw him: Ghost. Ollie had him cradled in her lap, h
is face chalk white and his body far too still.
“She tore him open. You have to help him.”
Her teeth chattered, clacking like this old set of wind-up plastic teeth my brothers had given me as a gag gift on my birthday.
“Here. Here.” I was talking, not knowing what I was saying.
I laid Ghost out between us. Ollie could barely let him go. He seemed to peel away from her, and when he did, a lot of him was missing.
“Oh, shit,” I said, staring down at his torn-up belly. I saw guts and bones. I would need some light.
“Sunny?” Hatter clanged down the stairs. “What’s going on?”
“Lights!” I yelled, voice cracking. “Get the lights!”
Ollie scrambled away, and as she went, I saw her limp and cataloged it in the back of my mind. She was hurt too. Something bad had happened. Something awful.
The lights flared on above me, too sharp and too bright, and everything around me was red, red, red. Blood coated Ghost in half-dried roping layers. His skin was cold.
I checked for a pulse, having to move my fingers around his neck because it was so ragged and ripped up. I found a subtle thrum right as Hatter knelt next to me.
“What do you need?” he asked.
“Everything.” I pushed what was left of Ghost’s shirt and jacket back, my hands hovering over his wounds as I tried to figure out where to start. Ollie had stuffed her jacket deep into his wounds, and it was the only thing keeping him alive.
“More specific, Sunshine.”
“Th-the med kits,” I managed. My hands were shaking. A voice in the back of my mind whispered that Ghost was going to die because of me, because I wasn’t good enough. “In the cabinets. Get all of them.”
He was already gone by the time Ollie returned. “Will he be okay?”
“What happened?” I asked. In the light, I saw the extent of her injures. Blood seeped from her shirt, her neck and right shoulder scraped and bitten.
“The Manananggal got him.”
“I have to stop this bleeding.”
There was too much blood to locate the source, though I suspected it was coming from everywhere. He needed more help than I could provide and more tools than I had on hand. He needed a hospital and a team of doctors. If I could get him stable enough to travel . . .
“Here.” Hatter dumped an armload of medical kits next to me and started opening them, but they were just the basics. Nothing was advanced enough to help Ghost.
I looked up at Ollie. “We have to get him to a hospital. I can’t do anything with just a few basic suture kits. It’s not enough.”
Ollie didn’t hesitate. “I’ll get the Jeep.”
Behind us, the stairs clanged with footsteps. I didn’t glance back, but I caught the shift in Ollie—a repositioning of her body toward the person, which I doubted she’d even noticed—and knew it was Luke.
“Ollie!” Luke shouted, running up to us.
I glanced back and saw him taking in the bloody scene. He was enough of a hunter to know what had happened and how quickly we had to move.
“Here’re the keys,” he said to Ollie. “Hatter, help me lift him.”
I maneuvered with the guys to stay in place next to Ghost. I kept my hands pressed against the jacket in his torn stomach, but I sensed a growing stillness inside him. His eyelids didn’t flutter as we passed under the door’s shadow and his breath didn’t condense in front of his mouth from the cold air outside.
Ollie started the car and revved the engine, blowing smoke out of the muffler. It skidded over the packed snow toward us. In a spray of snow, she hit the brakes right next to us. I yanked the back door open and moved out of the way. Luke, at Ghost’s head, angled into the car’s backseat and, with Hatter’s help, started sliding Ghost inside.
“Hey!”
I jumped, my eyes flashing to Ghost, but it wasn’t him who’d spoken. The voice had come from behind me.
Ollie stuck her head out of the driver’s window and shouted, “It’s Ghost! He’s hurt really bad!”
I spun around. Thad, Lauren, and their entire tracking team were running in from the western warehouses. Lauren motioned to the team and they circled around the car. Without a word, Thad watched as Luke and Hatter finished getting Ghost’s limp form into the car.
“The Manananggal?” Thad asked, eyes sweeping over Ghost’s injuries.
“She had him in the . . .”
Ignoring Ollie’s explanation, I moved to the door to join Luke in the back with Ghost. Hatter started toward the passenger front seat. As I went to close the door, Thad caught it in his grip.
“You can’t go,” he said.
“What do you mean? We have to. You don’t have enough equipment,” I said.
He shook his head. “He’s not going to the hospital.”
“What the fuck, Thad? He’s dying!” Ollie shouted from the front.
“Get in, Sunny,” Luke said without looking up from his task of applying pressure to Ghost’s wounds. I heard the strain in his voice and knew we had to go.
I started in again, but Thad grabbed my arm and pulled me back. I stumbled.
“Don’t fucking touch her!” Hatter yelled.
Ollie’s door sprang open, knocking into Thad. Around us, his team drew their guns, with too many safeties flipping off to make sense of. They were all pointing at us. Hatter was around the car in a flash, a fierce growl ripping from his throat, but a few of the bigger guys rushed forward and cut him off, throwing him against the car.
“Stop!” I screamed, still in Thad’s crushing grip, and watched in horror as his team shoved Hatter’s face against the icy window of the car.
“What the hell are you doing?” Ollie pounded her fist into Thad’s side. He grunted from the blow but didn’t release me.
“You can’t take him to the hospital, Ollie,” Thad said through his teeth.
“They’ll see what he is,” Lauren added, her gun pointed dead center at Ollie’s back.
“So?” she shouted, not bothering to address Lauren, though I kept my eyes on her. “He’s going to die!”
“We’ll do what we can to help him here, but he’s not going anywhere.” With a nod from Thad, the rest of his team moved to the backseat of the car and started pulling Ghost out. From inside, Luke swore and threatened them, but he could do nothing against the four guys tugging Ghost out by his feet.
I swayed, dizzy, when one guy—Reece, if I remembered correctly—tossed Ghost over his shoulder.
“You’re going to kill him,” I said, numbly watching as they took him back inside.
Thad released my arm, and the guys holding Hatter eased off. Luke clambered out of the car, through the blood Ghost had left behind, and emerged into the cold with a snarl. Ollie shoved Thad.
“What the hell?” she shouted, her voice echoing off the buildings around us.
“You know this, Ollie,” Thad said.
I didn’t care about the pain in his voice or the strain in his eyes. He was a monster. A killer. Ghost was just a boy.
“No, I don’t! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Those are the rules. None of us go to the hospital. No one can know what we are or where we are.” Thad talked as if he were explaining the basic ways of the world to a child.
“Whose rules?”
Thad cringed. “Hex’s.”
I’d stepped back far enough to see everyone all at once and how they were reacting. Hatter strained against the guys holding him, his frantic eyes locked on me. Luke was moving toward Ollie, who fractured when she realized her father had set the rules that would kill a boy tonight. Those words changed her—again. The rage boiled up, and she surged forward.
Lauren’s finger went to the trigger, her aim still on Ollie’s back. Her face lowered and her eyes narrowed.
I moved faster than anyone and launched myself at Lauren with a shrill sound coming from my throat. With a metal crunch, I hit her square in the side, sending her aim wide. The bullet cracked throug
h the air, hitting the ground a few feet to Ollie’s right. Together, Lauren and I hit the side of the Jeep. Her grip went slack on the gun, and I jerked it loose. My hands were moving of their own accord, spinning the gun’s barrel around, and my finger slid along the trigger guard. I aimed the muzzle at her face.
Ollie pivoted around. Everyone went still when they realized what had happened, except for Lauren, who shoved off the car and spat, “I’ll kill you, you bitch.”
“You were going to shoot me?” Ollie asked, but it wasn’t a question.
The killing sound was in her voice. Quiet. Calm. Like when we’d fought the aswang together during Fields. Her red murder haze, she’d called it.
“You were going to shoot me in the back.” She turned to Thad. “Like a little fucking coward. You’re all cowards.”
He raised his hands, hearing the tone in her voice too. Luke stepped forward, his eyes sweeping between Thad and Lauren and the team coming back from putting Ghost in the warehouse with their guns ready.
“We have to have rules,” Thad said to her. “Just like the university has rules.”
“No,” Ollie growled. “The university has a fully stocked hospital with doctors and trained nurses. They can save people. You have a little piece of shit,” she said, flicking her chin toward Lauren, “and a few fucking Band-Aids.”
There was going to be a fight. Tension crackled in the air like heat lightning on a summer evening. But Ghost was inside, still bleeding out. I hit the safety on the gun and tossed it into the shadows before turning back to the warehouse.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Lauren snapped at me.
I ignored her. The others followed me into the warehouse, matching my hurried steps. Inside, Ghost was lying on a piece of plastic, his clothes ripped open, with one guy applying pressure to his abdomen. I didn’t see his chest rising with air.
“Stay back,” Lauren hissed as she shoved by us. She started calling out directions at the others as she tore off her jacket and knelt next to Ghost. I stayed back, knowing by the strange stillness within him that he wasn’t there anymore.
I felt Ollie, Luke, and Hatter around me. Ollie was trembling, and Luke was holding her back, his grip on her shirt to keep from touching her and setting her off.