by Meg Collett
I covered my mouth, and I wondered what it meant that my heart broke for her after she’d killed my friend. After Ghost had practically bled out in my arms.
But she’d shredded her wing. I couldn’t think of any other reason why she would do that if she didn’t hate herself—if she didn’t plan on never flying again. She’d known I would come, and she’d led us here. She’d waited.
“Should I . . .” Luke reached for his crossbow.
“No. Leave her.”
I think she would have let us shoot her. She wouldn’t have done anything to protect herself. It had come to that for her. She’d hit her shattering point, her broken finish. This was it. So we waited, and we didn’t have to wait long.
Her keening cut off, and she went so still that I almost lost sight of her. Then, moving with quick, certain resolve, she reached forward and pulled the fire forward. It happened in less than a second, and I gasped as the flames engulfed her and the leather parcel. Then she started screaming.
I’d never heard anything like it, and I doubted I ever would again. I swear the sound burned me like her blood had. I couldn’t take it. I started to shiver and pressed my hands to my ears. The sound nearly forced me to my knees, and as I bent over, I looked back at the lake.
In the flames, her body, her rotted flesh and her immortal half, burned. Her hair billowed up in the topmost flames that licked and danced. In the deepest, hottest part, her face stretched open, her mangled mouth still making that horrible noise as the flames pulled her apart.
The smell hit me.
I did the only thing I could think of.
I turned to Luke and buried my face against his chest, wrapping myself up in his warmth, his scent, and his solidness. His arms came around, and he held me together as the Manananggal burned.
I began to cry.
For her. For me. For all of us.
* * *
The sun had completely risen by the time we returned. As we walked across the lot toward my mother’s warehouse, we saw the others gathered outside. They looked ready for a hunt—a hunt for us. Thad had assembled his team, and Lauren was busy barking orders, but as my foot crunched over a rock, it was Hex and his pack, standing off to the side, who snapped their heads in our direction, their eyes narrowing at our ashy scent.
When we drew closer, Thad noticed the thing in my hand and blanched. “Christ, Ollie.”
I ignored him and went straight to my father.
“What do you have for me, Olesya?” he asked.
I dropped the Manananggal’s burnt husk of a head at his feet and stepped back. “It’s time you told me the truth about my mother.”
S E V E N T E E N
Sunny
I knew who I had to call. She was the only person who could help me with my discovery.
When Ollie and Luke went through the window, and after I’d told Hatter I was going to take a shower, I went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet lid, and pressed connect on my phone.
The call went through. She picked up after a couple rings.
“Sunny?”
“Yeah,” I said, my heart beating a mile a minute, “it’s me. I need your help.”
Nyura Vasilievna, or Nyny as I’d come to know her during my time in Barrow, didn’t pause. “Anything.”
* * *
Ollie
Luke knew what to do while I talked with Hex. Hopefully, if everything went to plan, we’d be leaving here tonight and be well on our way to Kodiak by mid-morning.
But nothing ever went according to plan.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Hex said when we had some privacy out on the abandoned playground. It felt like a neat little circle coming here; it also felt like a neat little suicide, because I wouldn’t be leaving this place as the same woman who’d entered it.
“He deserved better than bleeding out in the back of a car.”
He lifted a shoulder as if to say, “It happens.” I wondered if he even knew Ghost’s name.
He nodded at my burnt hand. “You should really have your friend look at that.”
I tucked it into my jacket and said, “No lies.”
“I promise.” He sat on a rusted swing, the chain squealing in complaint.
I kept my place in front of him. “Promises mean shit and you know it. If you lie to me, you’ll regret it. That’s a promise.”
“I won’t ever lie to you.” Loose tendrils of dark hair played against the slight breeze that promised even more snow.
“Irena—”
“Your mother. Why can’t you call her that?”
“Irena,” I ground out between my teeth, “started this place, before she disappeared in 1985, because she fell in love with you after she’d captured you for one of Dean’s live experiments when he was searching for the fear switch. After that, she worked behind his back to protect halflings and find some balance in the coexistence between aswangs and humans because she loved you.”
He’d told me all of that before, but I needed to see his face as I spoke his words back to him. I needed to know he hadn’t lied to me.
“She did it because it was the right thing to do, not only because she loved me.”
“But in 1985, something happened.”
Hex’s jaw tightened, the only sign that these thoughts of the past might upset him. “Dean suspected she was double-crossing him, though he had no idea about this place. He couldn’t fathom how deep her betrayal went, but he knew enough, and he turned the tables on her. She became his live experiment.”
I recalled the pictures from Killian’s office—the ones that showed her being tortured and kept in a cell and experimented on. The ones labeled with “1986.”
“Dean thought his idea of a fear switch could be created in a halfling, in the merging of a human and an aswang. That evolution and nature would create a failsafe in the offspring.”
“He just wanted her dead.” Hex spat the words. He hated Dean almost as much as Dean hated him.
“But then you rescued her and ruined Dean’s experiments. And she went into hiding—from you.”
If he sensed the trap, if he noticed the change in my voice—the cool rage—he didn’t react. “Correct.”
I stared at him long enough that he sensed the weight of our silence. His dark eyes met mine, his hair still undulating in the wind, though the rest of him was perfectly, eerily still.
He didn’t scare me anymore.
I could ask the hard questions.
“I remember a sick mother,” I said, my voice tight. “A frail woman. She was terrified of her own shadow.” I choked down the tears, because I was damned if I would cry in front of him. “I thought I was crazy because I couldn’t equate this woman I knew with the warrior everyone else told me about, but I wasn’t crazy. Irena was just a husk by then, when she died, when she left me in a closet. She was terrified. She was being hunted.”
Hex didn’t blink. Didn’t stir. I imagined even the breeze around us went quiet. We were frozen in time.
“By you,” I finished.
Slowly, vertebrae by vertebrae, he stood. His shadow stretched toward me, his face haloed by the sun.
“She ran from you,” I went on, not backing down, not stepping away. “She died alone and terrified because you did something to her. She didn’t trust Dean or Killian or anyone from the university who would kill her, but most importantly, she didn’t trust you. So she ran and kept me a secret. I know this because you thought I was dead. She made you think that.” I took a deep, shaky breath. I remembered Coldcrow’s words back in Barrow. I was bent just like everyone else, but I was not broken. Hex had not broken me. No one had. “So tell me, Father, why did my mother run from you?”
Around us, the world wound back to life. The rusted swings squeaked in the breeze. The pressure of coming snow threatened to make my ears pop. And Hex stood in front of the sun, his face in shadows, his presence looming over me. I wasn’t afraid of him. I didn’t feel manipulated. This felt right, in my heart. I felt the
vindication for my mother deep in my bones.
People would pay for what they’d done to her.
“I guess you’ve earned the rest of our story after killing the Manananggal. That was our deal,” he said.
“The truth. No lies.”
He sighed and a bit of the tightness I sensed in him unraveled. I relaxed a fraction too, but only by a fraction.
“I wouldn’t lie to you. You deserve more than lies. I’m not like Dean or Killian Aultstriver or even your friends.”
I didn’t let myself react to his words. He was baiting me, nothing more.
“You will only ever get honesty from me. I could keep this from you, but I won’t. Even if you hate me for it.”
The cold words bit at my insides. I’d known the truth, but it still hurt to hear. I wanted Irena to be a warrior, not the scared woman I remembered. But she wasn’t.
“What did you do to her?”
I thought he wouldn’t answer. I thought he would feed me a lie, but when he spoke, I realized he’d needed time to prepare himself, because the truth was hurting him as much as it was killing me. That was the thing about truths, I was learning. They wrecked things.
“I did the worst thing I could have done to her,” he said, the words reverent. “I destroyed her faith. I took the thing she believed in most and ruined it. When she started this place, she still believed in the ideas of Fear University. She still thought it could do good, but she required a safe haven in the interim for those who needed protection. But she believed, up until that day in 1985 when Dean locked her up, that she could right the course Dean had set Fear University on. She thought she could rid that school of men like Killian and the old families who supported him. She believed the university and its hunters served as protectors against the evil in the world. I really do think she believed that up until the day she died.”
He waited for me to say something, to ask questions.
But I couldn’t say anything.
There were no words.
Of all the things I’d thought about my mother, I never imagined that she had still believed in the university’s credence. I thought when she disappeared, when she started this sanctuary in Anchorage, that she’d turned her back on Fear University for good.
Just like I’d been ready to do.
“I loved her so much,” Hex went on when I remained quiet, “but by tearing down her belief in the university, I ensured she could never believe in anything ever again, even me. Ollie, I broke your mother’s heart.”
That was part of the truth, but only part. I sensed the rest of it inside him.
“How?” I choked out. “How did you break her heart?”
“I only ever had the best intentions. I needed her to understand how bad that place was. How Fear University couldn’t protect against evil because it had become that very thing. She had to see it for herself.”
There was a cold wind inside me now, the killing calm I’d felt so many times before. My red haze. But it went so much deeper, entwining with my soul. “Tell me.”
He took a deep breath and said the words that ended me.
“When Dean took her in 1985, I waited. Like I commanded Thad to wait to rescue you, I waited to take her back from Dean. I left her there for months because, like you, I needed her to understand me when I told her the truth about the university, but I waited too long. She was broken by the time I found her in 1986. She didn’t trust me. She was the frail, terrified woman you remember, and she ran. She left me and this place she’d created behind.”
The truth. The weight of it settled on my shoulders.
Those wrecking words.
And God, my heart. My heart hurt with a pain I’d never felt before. Not in the ward when that day-form ’swang bit me and I truly felt pain for the first time in my life and I thought I might die from it. Not when Max tortured me for weeks. Not when I wished for death. Not when I thought I was so broken I’d never find my pieces again.
That was nothing compared to this, to what I felt for my mother.
“I waited,” Hex said again, quieter this time, like he needed to slice me open some more.
“You waited,” I said, rasping through the words, “because she believed in something different from you. Because she could see a vision for the world that you couldn’t. So you broke her for it. You obliterated her for having the nerve to believe in something good.”
Hex frowned at my words, the expression easing across his face like a tiny shift in the weather, like the movement of the earth beneath us. He was losing me.
Just like he’d lost her.
“She needed to understand, but she was too weak. You’re stronger than she ever was, Ollie. That’s why I brought you here. You can see what she couldn’t. You will help me destroy the university and everything it stands for.”
“You tried to break me like you broke her. Like mother, like daughter, right?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I could’ve left you with that man for years, and you still would’ve found your way out of the darkness.”
He was right about that. Another truth. I did find my way out of the darkness, and now I was standing in the light.
Because of my friends. My pack.
“I don’t think you waited long enough. Maybe if you’d left me for a few more weeks I would’ve been so messed up that I would’ve seen the world the way you see it, but you fucked up. You didn’t wait long enough. I break for no one.”
“Wait—”
“I,” I said, emphasizing each word, “break for no one.”
“Ollie, listen—”
“No. You’re going to listen now. She called out for you when Killian killed her. Did you know that? Killian told me. He said she screamed for you when he cut her open, over and over again. I saw a picture of how he killed her. That vision of her is burned into my mind. But do you want to know what I think?”
“What?” The word tore from his throat, ragged and cut up.
“I think she still loved you, even after all you did to her. She saw the good in you, just like she saw the good in Fear University, and she wanted a better change for you too. Maybe when she ran from you she was trying to make you understand. Maybe she wanted you to see that people have the capacity for change, and when she died, she died still loving you for what you could’ve been.”
He stared me down for a long moment before saying, “I’ve done the exact opposite of what I set out to do, haven’t I?”
“Again,” I agreed.
“You’re going back to the university.”
“Winter break is almost over.” I reached into my pocket and drew out the silver knuckles. “You probably want these back.”
He looked away then, the morning light moving down his face and making him look hollow. “Keep them. You’ve earned them.”
They felt heavy in my hand, but like my mother’s whip, they also felt right. I slipped them back into my pocket. “I guess that’s it then.”
He stepped back and sat on the swing again, like he was giving up. Like he’d lost. But when he spoke, his words were cold. Lethal. “And what we spoke about regarding Killian’s trial?”
“What do you think?”
“Because you’re my daughter, I’m giving you one more chance to make the right decision. And for your sake,” he said slowly, “I hope you do.”
* * *
“You’re leaving just like that, huh?”
I turned around. Thad stood silhouetted in the bay door’s interior light. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest. Against the chill or me, I didn’t know. I glanced back at the others, who were already in the car.
“Is that a problem?” I asked slowly, because I really didn’t want it to be. I didn’t have another fight in me tonight, especially with Thad.
His attention shifted, and I watched the thoughts sift through his head. Carefully, he said, “I hear it in your voice, you know.”
My fingertips brushed against the knuckles in my pocket. “What do you th
ink you hear?”
He touched the mangled mess of his neck, no longer bandaged now, but just as awful. I wondered if he felt his scars like I often needed to feel the ones on my face, like we had to reassure ourselves we weren’t the people we pretended to be. His hand fell away when he noticed my attention.
“You’re not going to do it.”
Hex’s plan to destroy everything on the night of Killian’s trial, along with his threat to hurt my friends if I didn’t help him. But I wasn’t helping, and he wasn’t hurting anyone.
“No,” I said. “I’m not. Will that be a problem too?”
“I can’t go against him, you know?” The words weren’t really a question; he didn’t expect me to answer. “I have to keep the halflings safe. That’s what I do. If I go against him . . .”
“I get it.”
His attention drifted again as he said, “I lied. Well, technically I’ve lied about a lot of things, but I mean when you first woke up and I made you think Luke hated you after we’d told him the truth.”
“I figured as much.”
“The truth is that when Luke came to me and he heard what I was, I expected him to kill me. He didn’t because all he could think about was saving you. I knew then that if an Aultstriver could see past what I was and understand that I might be the only way to save you that things had changed. Things could change. He really loves you, Ollie.”
He dragged a hand through his hair and glanced over his shoulder. After a deep breath, he went on. “I didn’t want to wait. Luke made me want to find you right then. His love for you, even when he knew what you were, was so strong that I wanted to go against everything I’ve been raised to believe, because you didn’t deserve a single second with that monster. You didn’t deserve to be whittled down to the barest bones of who you are so that anyone, even your father, could build you back up. It wasn’t right, Ollie, and I’m sorry for my part in it. I really am.”