by Meg Collett
I knew people were dying. I knew aswangs were attacking. I knew I was dying.
But I felt oddly . . . fine with it. I could do my part. That was all.
The front door was torn from the wall, and I walked through the hole.
Outside was worse than I’d expected.
The front gate beyond the courtyard had been reduced to rubble. Areas of the fence had been blasted apart. Guards tried to hold the line, but I saw almost as many ’swangs as I did hunters. One ran by me, its ears swiveling toward me and a snarl on its mouth, while I just watched. It skidded to a stop and turned back.
I pulled out a glass vial of bane. It was probably enough to kill thirty ’swangs, but I didn’t take the time to doll out a pinch.
It leaped toward me, mouth open.
I tossed the vial into its mouth. It hit the back of its throat, and the ’swang choked, biting down on reflex. I stepped aside as it slammed into the school’s entry wall behind me. I heard the glass break in its mouth and imagined the bane sliding down its throat. I shrugged and walked forward.
A hunter rushing across the courtyard saw me. His eyes flashed to the ’swang behind me. “Go to the dorms,” he shouted, running up to me and waving me back. “Everyone is on lockdown there!”
“Take some wolf’s bane,” I said, offering him a tray of vials.
He blinked at me, his legs fumbling to a stop. “What?”
“I have bane. You can have some if you want.”
He took the tray. “Are you okay?”
“Peachy!”
Across the courtyard, a commotion caught my attention. A group of ’swangs had a person on the ground between them. They dove in like vultures swooping in from the sky and tore at him. He screamed.
I recognized his voice.
Killian.
I moved forward without thinking, my eyes locked on the heap of flesh and teeth. I wondered who had broken him out of his cell and if another halfling had snuck in to do the job. I thought I should maybe call for help or get that hunter to help me.
I was close enough to see that an aswang had Killian’s hand in its mouth. It shook its head like a dog with a bone and tore his hand from his arm. There was a lot of blood, almost as much as I’d lost, which reminded me: I needed to move.
I turned away from Killian, owing him nothing and unafraid to leave him for dead. My eyes fell on the rook’s nest overlooking Tick Tock Bay, the one I’d found Ollie in on the second morning I knew her. I spotted Luke, the countless spotlights along the top of the walls lighting up his form. He was easy enough to find because he was the only other person standing as still as I was. I glanced up right as he saw his father.
We both watched the ’swangs tear into Killian’s belly and pull out his guts. Killian’s screams were choked and tortured, awful and wretched.
Back in the nest, Luke raised his crossbow and stared down the sights. He paused, only slightly, and then fired.
The arrow knocked his father’s head back against the courtyard’s tiled bricks. It had gone straight through his eye. The ’swangs, knowing the game was over, dispersed to find fresher prey.
I looked up in time to see Luke staring at his father with an odd look on his face.
Something like remorse. Something like relief.
I had to keep going, my brain told me. When I walked off, I thought I might be floating. I felt so light and cool on the inside. Maybe I was already dead. Maybe I was just a ghost.
The thought didn’t bother me as much as it should have.
“Hatter?” I called.
Another hunter ran by.
“Hey!” I shouted at him. “Do you want some bane?”
He stumbled to a stop, looked at me, looked at the bane tray I was offering, and took off running again.
“Well, okay. It would help, you know.”
“Sunny?”
I turned toward the voice.
Hatter stood a few feet away with Ollie’s arm slung over his shoulder. She was slumped forward, her eyes closed. A trickle of blood poured down from her temple. Hatter’s eyes went from my arm, to the vials, to my face.
My face. I felt the difference too.
Something was wrong with me.
I smiled at him. “I brought bane! Don’t use it all at once.”
He took the trays when I offered them to him. Something was wrong with him too, because when he looked at the blood coming down my arm and pooling at my feet, he didn’t move. Normally, he would’ve moved. At least I thought so. Maybe my face really did look bad. Maybe I really was a ghost.
Ollie groaned as he shifted her around. Her eyelids fluttered. She muttered something that sounded like my name.
My attention shifted to Hatter. “Tell her I love her.”
He still hadn’t recovered from seeing me.
I fell to my knees.
I think what happened next was me dying, but it felt pretty good.
Like a nap on a rainy day.
Like my Gran brushing my hair with her fingers.
Like . . . the end.
T W E N T Y - T H R E E
Sunny
Five Days Later
Fear University had managed to beat the aswangs back on the night of the fight. The bane had helped. I guess, in that way, I’d helped too.
But more importantly, the university did indeed change in the days after the battle broke out, just like Ollie promised it would.
She always kept her promises. It was the scariest thing about her.
The changes were small, of course. The bigger ones would happen in the years to come. Ollie sent for the halflings at her mother’s warehouse in Anchorage. Any who wanted a safe place were welcome at Fear University. Not all of them came, only some, including Thad, but some was a good enough start.
Tully’s funeral was held the day after the fight. They burned his body separately from the others, on a small pyre along the rocky beach of Tick Tock Bay during sunset. As his ashes danced into the sky, those watching imagined him joining his family. Luke had never told anyone he didn’t believe in an afterlife, but as he watched Tully’s body burn, he prayed. He prayed that Tully found peace. Found his wife and little ones. Luke prayed for a peaceful place in death. He hoped someone would pray for the same thing for him at his funeral one day.
Ollie stayed on the beach a long time after the pyre was just a smoking heap of char. The waves rolled in softly, breaking against the rocks and slipping up to her toes before trickling back again. She watched the waves come and go, the moonlight inching across the bay and the cliffs wrapping around her like a hug.
After a long while, she stood, her father’s silver and diamond knuckles in the palm of her hand. His body hadn’t been amongst the aswang dead the next morning, and none of the hunters who could recount the events had spotted him. Ollie thought he might have left after killing Tully, but she couldn’t be sure. The only thing she knew for certain was that he was still out there, alive. She pulled her arm back, ready to send the piece of her father into the ocean.
But right as she was about to throw it, she paused, the diamonds pressing against her fingers. She lowered her arm and stared at the weapon. She couldn’t do it. Part of her wanted to, wanted nothing more to do with her father, but to a bigger part of herself, drowning a piece of her father felt like running away, and Ollie wasn’t running ever again.
The day would come when she would have to hunt him down. That day might come sooner than she wanted to think about, but when it did, she would be ready. Just like she would be ready when Dean betrayed her. The day would come when she couldn’t further his search for the fear switch, and he would come after her. She had more battles in her future, but they didn’t feel so pressing today.
She stood on the beach and made peace with the fact that she was a monster’s daughter, her father’s child. It was easier than she thought, because beneath the moon of Tick Tock Bay with Fear University at her back, she was also her mother’s daughter. She’d discovered how to believe in
something bigger than herself. She believed in the good of the whole rather than the sins of the individual.
The best lesson a mother could teach her daughter during war.
For a moment, Ollie found all her bent angles and all her sins a little less worthy of fear.
She was done being afraid of herself.
Killian’s body was burned the day after Tully’s. He didn’t get a pyre, but Luke dug a hole in the ground the size of his body, and as his father smoldered, he stood beside Ollie, his mother, and Hatter. When it was all over, he took some of his father’s ashes for reasons he wasn’t quite able to express. Later, he would put them in a thin leather pouch and hang it around his neck. He’d never take it off, and it would always remind him that he could be more.
After they’d filled in the hole, leaving most of his father behind in an unmarked place beneath the cottonwoods, he walked his mother to the airfield and said goodbye. She’d return to Barrow, to her home, along with the other Barrow hunters. Eve promised to look after her, and Luke vowed to visit more.
His mother paused on her way to the plane and looked back. She said to tell Irena Volkova she said goodbye.
Luke almost corrected her, but he decided not to. He said he would and waved as he watched the plane take off.
He thought Ollie might enjoy being confused with her mother on occasion. When he told her later that night, outside my room in the ward, she smiled and kissed him without hesitation. They stood there for a few minutes, him bowed over her, arms wrapped around her waist, his forehead resting against hers, and her on her tiptoes, her arms locked around his neck, and her body pressed into him.
His words washed over her face as he said, “She’ll be okay.”
Ollie knew who he meant.
Me.
Ollie pressed a final kiss against his mouth, quick and familiar, like there would be many more to follow in the years to come. Years of holding him. Kissing him. Finding his caramel candy wrappers under the bed. She took his hand and walked into my room.
Hatter sat next to me, as he had been almost every moment since I’d found him on the battlefield.
Nyny busied herself by taking my vitals and checking the bandages on my arm, which the university’s doctors had been able to save, though I would have massive black scarring. She pulled back my eyelids and shone a light into my pupils. Nothing, same as it had been since I’d injected myself. A coma like this, she knew, was bad. The fool, she thought, but she smiled faintly down at me and pushed back a piece of my hair. The crazy fool. She’d done my blood work, proving we’d been close to finding an antidote.
Nyny and Ollie speculated that I hadn’t just been delusional from the blood loss when I took the antidote. They had a theory about my reaction to ’swang saliva. They thought it had made me fearless. I thought that was funny.
I was the Cowardly Lyon. I always would be.
I’d hoped to avoid all this fuss, if I were honest. I didn’t like it. It bothered me to worry them so much.
Hatter’s guilt was the worst of it. I hated it. The first night in the ward, when I didn’t wake up and everyone was still bleeding and shaken from the fight, Nyny told them what we’d been doing in the lab, what I’d taken, and the “why” of it all. Ollie had cried and Luke had held her. But Hatter had crumpled. He’d fallen to his knees with my hand gripped in both of his, and he’d lost it. And Luke had knelt next to him and held him against his chest. And Ollie had taken a spot on the floor on his other side, her arms going around his middle. And they’d sat like that for hours, holding each other, not saying a word.
AndAndAndAndAnd.
And I wished I could have spared them all of that.
I wished I could have told Luke that good men have to fight in hard wars. They have to do things that burden them and torment them and hurt them. And all those bad things they know they’ve done are actually the reasons they are such good, good men. Hard things weigh on good men because they’re capable of carrying it.
I wished I could have told Ollie that her mother would be proud of her. I wished I could take her face in my hands and stare into her eyes and tell her she was everything her mother could have ever hoped for her. She would have to face down so much in the future—her father and resistance against the changes she’d made to Fear University—but I wished she knew she would face it all with the grace and goodness of her mother, and also with the fierceness and the power of her father.
She had a monster’s heart.
And I would tell her that was the very best, most wonderful thing about her.
She was our monster. All of ours. And we loved every bit of her for it.
And Hatter.
My whole heart. I wished. I wished. I wished.
I wished when he was kneeling on the ward floor, grasping my hand, that I could pull him up and hold him. I wished I could kiss him and tell him I still saw him. I would always see him, no matter what. I wished he knew the fractured parts of him, of his mind, didn’t define him, even though he spent every day of his life making them so. I wished I could have told him his friends would love him no matter what. We didn’t need the mad Hatter he’d created; we just needed him.
I wished it all and so much more.
I wished the world for them.
And now.
Now, Ollie walked into my room with Luke’s hand in hers. Hatter glanced up from his chair next to my bed and nodded at them. Ollie and Nyny exchanged glances over Hatter’s head. Nyny shook her head slightly. Ollie’s stomach sank.
We all knew the unspoken words:
Brain damage.
I was already gone.
My desperate attempt to save us all had killed me. The machines were keeping me alive.
On the other side of my bed, holding my other hand, was Gran. My mother stood behind her. My father had left to take a quick nap in their room. My brother was somewhere outside, helping, because he could only think of Seth when he was in the ward. I understood. I wished I could have given him a hug and told him it was okay. The room was crowded anyway.
My Gran’s soft Filipino prayers had become such a fixture that they were like the wind: felt, but not always heard. Just a current that circled around the room.
And.
And.
And.
But.
But when Gran’s prayers stopped mid-word, everyone noticed. They all stopped. When she stood, raising my hand to her lips and squeezing it tight enough to nearly break the bones, and when she cried out softly with tears in her eyes, everyone froze.
But she smiled.
“There you are,” she whispered to me, laughing, crying, smiling. “There you are, sweet girl.”
Hatter rocked forward, his eyes flashing from my Gran to me.
He and Gran had gotten along well. I’d known they would. She nodded at him, tears pooling in the edges of her wrinkled, beautiful smile.
“Sunshine,” he choked on the word as he staggered out of his chair. He leaned over me, taking my face in his hand, and kissed me. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
His eyes searched my face.
“Sunshine,” he wished.
And I opened my eyes.
Acknowledgments
First of all, thank you, Nate, for dealing with my crazy when I’m on deadline. Wylla, Drax, and Mandy, thank you for making sure my days are never boring and for having to go to the bathroom right when I finally sit down to write. Big, huge thanks to my indie team: Najla Qamber Designs for the amazing covers, Jessica West and Arrowhead Editing for the epic editing, Stephanie Kelley for reading this book a billion times and talking me off the ledge, and to my Facebook reader group and my Reviewers Club for loving this series as much as I do.
About the Author
Meg Collett lives deep in the hills of Tennessee where the cell phone service is a blessing and the Internet is a myth of epic proportions. She is the mother of one giant horse named Elle and three dogs named Wylla, Mandy, and Drax the Destroyer. Her husband is
a saint for putting up with her ragtag life.
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Other Books by Meg Collett
The Fear University Series
Fear University
The Killing Season
Monster Mine
The End of Days Trilogy
The Hunted One
The Lost One
The Only One
End of Days Trilogy Box Set
The Days of New Serials
(an End of Days spin-off series)
Speaking of the Devil
Full of the Devil
Better the Devil You Know
Devil in the Details
Give the Devil His Due
Days of New Complete Box Set
Canaan Island Novels
Fakers
Novellas
Little Girls and Their Ponies