Monster Mine (10 page)

“
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. Ollie 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

“
I
f 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.”