by Meg Collett
“I thought after I lost communication with Luke and Hatter weeks ago that you’d either turned them against me or killed them.”
I took a seat in one of the leather wingbacks and crossed my legs. “Not quite.”
Neither of us spoke. He kept quiet, wanting me to overplay my hand the way I always had before. He had no clue what this meeting was about or whether I’d come to kill him. But I’d thrown him off by sitting down instead of leaping across the desk and tearing for his throat. I let the seconds tick by.
He broke first. “Contact regulations aside, I think I can guess where you’ve been these past few weeks.”
“It would probably be a good guess.”
The silence didn’t last nearly as long as the last one before he spoke again. “You should know I never intended for Max to find you. I had hunters on him twenty-four seven, but he slipped our tail. He vanished. I thought he’d gone back south.”
He talked fast, and I figured it out. Dean was a little afraid of me too.
My eyes shifted to the window. From here, I could just make out the walls bordering the school’s property, the massive guard towers, and the rook’s nests dotted in between. A few dots atop the fence shifted—the guards on patrol.
I remembered running that fence line. I knew every inch of it.
I turned my attention back to Dean. “I now believe, you know.”
His hand went to his glass of scotch before he remembered it was empty. “Believe what?”
“In fate. Coldcrow talked about it a lot back in Barrow before Killian murdered him.”
A flash of pain crossed Dean’s face, and I wondered if he and Coldcrow had once been good friends. Close, like brothers, similar to Luke and Hatter.
“I didn’t want to believe in it because I thought it was a weakness. A liability, of sorts, to put faith into something more than myself. But as Max tortured me, I knew it could only be fate that brought us to these big moments in our lives. These big crossroads. These decisions we have to make for ourselves.”
Coldcrow had also told me I could be the warrior Fear University needed, even if I didn’t agree with Dean. I believed in that too.
“What did you decide?”
“I decided to believe in something more than myself.”
Dean leaned back in his chair again, relaxing away from the weapon in his desk. As he moved, I smelled leather and old books and lemons. This office had once soothed me, just like he’d comforted me back when I first arrived here, the way a father might have.
Now I knew just how bent he was. How bad those ruined parts of him were. He’d fallen as far as Killian had, but no one had caught him yet. I would never forget that when I dealt with him.
“I’m shocked Hex didn’t change your mind.”
There it was, Dean’s big move. If this was chess, then he’d just pushed his queen out onto the board, ready to hunt me down.
I stood. He swiveled around in his chair as I walked to the window behind his desk. I stared down at the people who’d watched me walk through them like I’d risen from the grave. Maybe I had. Maybe the fear I’d seen in their eyes, right next to the awe, had been right.
“That was fate too,” I said, “him finding me.”
I left out Thad’s involvement. I had no clue what Dean suspected there, but it had to be something, since Thad had disappeared alongside me. Still, I didn’t need to be the one who named him. I owed him that much.
“How so?”
I put my hand to the glass. I knew it was cold, the logical part of my brain told me that much, but I didn’t feel the sting of it prickling against my fingertips. I breathed against it, and my view blurred as my breath condensed against the glass.
“He told me the truth about her, and the pieces came together about what had happened, what she’d fought for, and why she’d died. I finally understood all of it.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw his eyes sweep to the door. Maybe he expected Hex to come barreling in at any moment. I turned away from the glass and walked a slow circuit around his office, looking at the things he’d collected over his lifetime and put on his shelves. With each step, I felt the thump of my father’s silver knuckles against my hip. In my other pocket, my mother’s whip was clean, oiled, and wound tight.
He kept quiet this time. I think he understood this wouldn’t go any of the ways he’d thought it might.
“He was the first one who didn’t lie to me about her, but he should have.”
I looked back at Dean. He was quick to hide his surprise, but not fast enough.
“Because now I’m back here. That’s fate, you know. Not all this other bullshit. Fate is fighting against something over and over and still finding yourself back at the same spot you started at. Maybe it’s a little like insanity in that sense.”
“What are you saying?”
“I have to ask you something first.”
“Okay.”
His voice was tentative, more than a little worried. “What happened to Peg Coldcrow? Did you kill her?”
Dean’s jaw clenched, and I watched for any sign that he was lying. If he lied about this, I might kill him.
“She died in the attack against her home. We told her uncle she was alive and inside the university hospital so he wouldn’t leave Barrow. He was the only one you would trust, and we played the lack of information against him. It was Killian’s idea.”
I doubted that, but I believed him on the rest, at least for now, until I chose to learn something different. Until then . . .
“I’ll ask again. What is this about, Ollie? What are you saying in all of this?”
I readied myself and dove in. “I’m saying Hex is coming here with an army of aswangs and halflings to attack Fear University on the night of Killian’s trial. I’m saying he wants to kill everyone, all at once, in one big bloodbath.”
Dean reacted as if I’d slapped him across the face. He half stood from his seat, mouth open to speak, but I went on.
It was time to push my queen out onto the board, to attack and hunt him down.
“I’m saying I’m here to fight with you.”
I moved away from the bookshelves, back toward his desk. He shrank, ever so slightly, and I knew I had him.
“I’m saying I’ll let you study me. I’ll hunt your live subjects the way my mother did. I’ll help with your fear switch research. I’m saying this because you’re going to give me something in return, and you won’t like it. You’ll hate it. It’ll probably turn every old, Original family against you. It’ll probably mean you won’t be president much longer. But you’ll do it.”
I put my hands, my burnt one still tightly bandaged, on his desk and leaned forward.
“You’re going to do it because if you don’t, I won’t be in this office bringing you everything you’ve ever wanted. I won’t be offering the validation of your life’s research. You’ll do everything I ask of you because you don’t want me on my father’s side, fighting against you. You don’t want me outside these walls. Because if I am, you know what will happen. You’ll lose everything.”
He stood and moved to the bar cart next to his desk. After pouring himself another drink, he sat down heavily, with an exhaustion he hadn’t shown me before.
After a long pull of amber liquid, he asked, “What do you want?”
I sat down too, across from him so we were at eye level. “Changes to the university and the way it operates. Changes to whom it lets in.”
He closed his eyes for a second, took another drink, and said slowly, “That won’t be easy. It will turn the other schools and hunters and bases and families and everyone against us. It’ll be Fear University versus everyone else.”
“Exactly. And we’ll take them down one by one until they’re forced to change or risk annihilation. It’s that easy.”
“Not that I doubt you,” he said, drinking again, “but how do you intend to go toe to toe with some of our world’s greatest forces? There are universities all over the wor
ld. Families with generations’ worth of resources. Bases with hundreds of hunters. How can one girl take them down?”
I smiled. I couldn’t help picturing my mother. Couldn’t help the hope that I might make her proud. “Not one girl. I’ll have an army. Hunters. Halflings. Aswangs. Humans and monsters who all believe in balance and coexistence. The war won’t be against every ’swang alive. It’ll be against the ignorant and the close-minded. Against the fuckers who sit behind a desk with a family name, a wad of money, and hunters, out fighting and dying in their name, protecting them. We’ll make them change. They’ll change or they’ll understand exactly why you let me take control of Fear University, because I’ll crush them.”
He’d gone a bit pale, but to his credit, he hadn’t started yelling or calling for guards to put me in the cell next to Killian. He was smarter than that. I needed to give him more credit.
“Your mother used to speak of balance and coexistence toward the end.” He swirled the remaining scotch in his glass, his eyes on the liquid.
“Right up to the day you took her.”
He rubbed his temples. “I wish I would’ve known back then how much I would come to regret that decision.”
“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
The 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.